June 2009 - Arch-general - lists.archlinux.org

[arch-general] The ultimate Home Theater / media center computer
by RedShift 20 Nov '09

20 Nov '09

Hi list Somehow I got it into my head that I want a home theater PC. I'm growing tired of having to watch television and movies on my computer's 17" LCD screen. At the shop I used to work at, once in a while we'd build a media center computer, but the concept never really took off here (Belgium). There are many reasons for that, such as: * Television is major suckage here (thanks to That Big Company and Government-Not-Governing). The entire country is split into very small regions where broadcast frequencies differ, there's no unified TV guide system, not all regions can receive all channels. Digital television is even worse: That Big Company forces you to buy one of their proprietary decoders. The only way to receive digital television without restrictions is DVB-T with a very limited number of channels (basically nothing). * At that time, the hardware sucked (noisy, too big, not stylish enough to put it along your other hi-fi components, not powerful enough, limited digital outputs, etc...). The software wasn't much better (too complicated, took a long time to start, etc...). Anyway, my goal is to build the *ULTIMATE* HTPC. As such, strong demands must be met: The hardware: * It should be stylish, a timeless look which fits with your other hi-fi components. * It must be entirely silent. Zero moving components. No exceptions. * Unrestricted fully digital outputs. * Must be able to play at least 720p MKV's using x264 encoded video. * Easy remote control. No remote controls with more buttons than there are stars in the sky and certainly no "dual function" buttons (those functions in a different color which you need to flick a switch or are context dependent). * Able to receive DVB-C. The software: * There is no room for "Digital Rights Management" fascism. All content must play flawless and in the highest quality possible. In some cases this will mean circumventing protections. That'll probably make the device illegal in some countries, but I don't care. * Easy user interface (also see hardware remote control point). * Can connect to NAS or other storage devices such as USB sticks. In total: * Must be a complete replacement for your DVD player and other media devices. The goal here is keeping the number of remote controls down. Ideally you should only have two: one for controlling your HTPC and one for your hi-fi set. * It is geared towards modern television, that means stuff like HDTV and no legacy connector stuff (like composite). With those goals set, I started looking for hardware. Here's what I've come up with: * Case: Silverstone LC19 http://www.silverstonetek.com/products/p_spec.php?pno=lc19&area=usa + Fanless PSU. + Casefans can be removed + Comes with PCI-e and PCI risercards + Integrated cardreader and slimline optical slot + Available in black and silver + Accommodates standard ATX I/O shield + Room for a 3.5" storage device (SSD?) + Vents right above the CPU + Slim - Fits only small motherboard sizes - Only 120 watt PSU - No infrared receiver, no remote control * Motherboard: Asus P5N7A-VM http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=8YiUFvK51IergAqY&templete=2 + Powerful on-board graphics (nVidia 9300) + Supports 16 GB of RAM + eSATA port + Optical audio output + HDMI, DVI and VGA video output + Gigabit ethernet + Solid caps - nVidia on-board graphics (requiring proprietary driver) - On-board graphics use system memory - Crappy realtek audio codec * DVB-C receiver: ? I have zero experience with DVB-C receivers for computers. I've come across the "DVBWorldDTV Cable" (http://www.worlddvb.com/product/htm/pcic.htm) which seems to provide what I'm looking for. Anyone know how good this hardware actually is and how well it's supported by linux? I have an old hauppauge PVR-350 card which works well, unfortunately hauppauge doesn't seem to have DVB-C products. * Remote control: ? I want to have something simple here. Maybe a small USB infrared receiver and a simple remote control with buttons up, down, left, right, enter? Anyone know if such hardware exists? * Processor: Intel Celeron? No idea how much processing power would be required for a decent HTPC. Preferably as low powered as possible, as the CPU will have to be passively cooled. * Processor cooling: ? I was thinking of a big block with small fins which you see a lot in 1U rackservers. Copper would be the logical choice but from what I've read, aluminum allows for better heat transfer to the environment. So a copper base with alu fins would be ideal. * Storage: ? For storing the operating system I was thinking of those IDE compact flash cards. Downside is that they are very slow. An SSD can be considered but I want to leave the option open to use the 3.5" bay for a hard drive for people that don't have the luxury of a NAS or don't want to leave a NAS running all times. Moving along. The most annoying aspect: software. Obviously we want all our software to be open source. A shortlist of open source media center software: * MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org/) * XBMC (http://xbmc.org/) * Elisa (http://elisa.fluendo.com/) The point I really want to focus on is ease of use. Take this as a benchmark: you only have to explain your parents once how it works. Any suggestions, comments, thoughts, etc... are appreciated. Thanks, Best regards, Glenn

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[arch-general] AUR Search
by Andrei Thorp 14 Jul '09

14 Jul '09

Hello there! Today, I'd like to be all complainy about the AUR search feature. I haven't really looked around, but are there plans to improve it? Or is the solution just "use google with site://"? It seems to be kind of bad at finding stuff. Some examples: - Can't search by description (well, it does search by description by default, but it's not in the advanced options anywhere) - Can't really do any decent multi-word searches afaik. To take an example from the other argument thread, try searching for "java gstreamer". It finds neither gstreamer-java nor java-gstreamer. It actually finds nothing at all. - Similarly, wildcards seem to not work. "java*gstreamer" has no results. - It seems to not even do exact matches first. For example, search for my package, "sup". There is a package in AUR that's exactly named "sup", but if you search for that, you get 658 results, sorted alphabetically! - Which reminds me, what about sorting by relevance somehow? Perhaps sort by a weighting of votes, age, downloads, etc. I'm sorry if I'm bringing this up as someone's already writing improvements for AUR and this is just a waste of time :) Anyway, thanks! -- Andrei Thorp, Developer: Xandros Corp. (http://www.xandros.com) <miguel> any new sendmail hole I have to fix before going on vacations? -- Seen on #Linux

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[arch-general] syslog-ng build error
by Baho Utot 05 Jul '09

05 Jul '09

Making syslog-ng 3.0.1-6 i686 in Clean Chroot ==> Making package: syslog-ng 3.0.1-6 i686 (Wed May 27 19:31:24 UTC 2009) ==> Checking Runtime Dependencies... ==> Checking Buildtime Dependencies... ==> Installing missing dependencies... resolving dependencies... looking for inter-conflicts... if gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/eventlog -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -march=athlon -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -Wall -MT main.o -MD -MP -MF ".deps/main.Tpo" -c -o main.o main.c; \ then mv -f ".deps/main.Tpo" ".deps/main.Po"; else rm -f ".deps/main.Tpo"; exit 1; fi gcc -march=athlon -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -Wall -o syslog-ng main.o libsyslog-ng.a -lrt -lnsl -Wl,-Bstatic -lfl -lglib-2.0 -levtlog -lssl -lcrypto -lz -lz -lwrap -lcap -lpcre -Wl,-Bdynamic -ldl /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lcap collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [syslog-ng] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/build/src/syslog-ng-3.0.1/src' make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/build/src/syslog-ng-3.0.1' make: *** [all] Error 2 ==> ERROR: Build Failed. What is -lcap ? Is it looking for a static lib cap?

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Re: [arch-general] [arch-dev-public] [idea] global link database for all packages
by Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi 05 Jul '09

05 Jul '09

Pierre Schmitz wrote: > * Only extract files from /opt /lib /sbin /bin /usr/lib /usr/sbin /usr/bin > This will be omit some ELF files that are outside these directories: For example: http://archlinux.djgera.com.ar/pkgdyn/out/i686/core.badfhs.txt http://archlinux.djgera.com.ar/pkgdyn/out/i686/extra.badfhs.txt http://archlinux.djgera.com.ar/pkgdyn/out/i686/community.badfhs.txt -- Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi ( djgera ) http://www.djgera.com.ar KeyID: 0x1B8C330D Key fingerprint = 0CAA D5D4 CD85 4434 A219 76ED 39AB 221B 1B8C 330D

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[arch-general] 2 annoying bugs in kde
by Edgar Kalkowski 02 Jul '09

02 Jul '09

Hi list! I am using current KDE 4.2.4 from core and am experiencing these two little things that are not really disturbing but rather annoying: 1) Every time I quit okular it crashes and shows a crash message. A quick search of the web brought up that this was “a minor regression in kdelibs“ and should be fixed by now (sorry, I don’t remember the actual site I read this on). So my question is: Is anyone experiencing the same problem and has a fix? Or do we really just need to wait for an update of KDE? If so: Is an update planned or do we have to wait for 4.3 or 4.2.5? 2) Every time KDE starts up it shows (after a little while) the following message in a native X dialog: “Could not start ksmserver. Check your installation.” If I click on “OK” or kill the message window X restarts. A web search on this one revealed nothing really helpful so now I’m just leaving the message window open on an unused desktop. When doing this everything seems to work normal and as expected. In fact “ps -elf | grep ksmserver” reveals that the specified program is indeed running. Does anyone get this error, too, and perhaps knows how to fix it? Thank you in advance! Edgar

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[arch-general] epiphany does not add url during ssl acceptance
by Adam Stokes 01 Jul '09

01 Jul '09

Just curious if anyone else is running into this small problem? Basically when adding an exception to a unverified ssl site I have to manually put the url into the location text field rather than it populating automatically like firefox. Thanks

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[arch-general] Archlinux on a virtualbox
by richard terry 30 Jun '09

30 Jun '09

I can't seem to find out how to set up a network on a freshly installed virtualbox with archlinux. Any pointers to help appreciated. Richard

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[arch-general] Arch Linux Turkish Community Web Site is Renewed!
by Alper KANAT 30 Jun '09

30 Jun '09

Hey There, I, as one of the members of the Arch Linux Turkish Community, want to present you our new website on http://www.archlinux.org.tr ! To have such an address we have also co-op'd with Linux Foundation of Turkish Users (a.k.a. LKD). Hope you like it! [image: smile] Alper KANAT <alperkanat(a)raptiye.org>

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Re: [arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Kill old gcc versions
by Biru Ionut 29 Jun '09

29 Jun '09

Jan de Groot wrote: > On Sun, 2009-06-14 at 19:06 +0200, Thomas Bächler wrote: >> Can we kill gcc3 and gcc34 from extra? We used to need them for qemu, >> but that's fixed, so they're useless. Objections? > > Move it to AUR. We don't need these anymore. > virtualbox recommendation are gcc3.3 or later except for the GCC 4.0.x series). GCC 4.3.3 is recommended. i've tried to compile with gcc 4.4.0 and is failing. i suggest to move it to community because there are severals packages[1] that have in makedepends gcc34. [1] http://dpaste.com/55327/ -- Ionut

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[arch-general] Default Applications -> WM -> Compiz -- Broken, Compiz will not start that way
by David C. Rankin 28 Jun '09

28 Jun '09

Listmates, Compiz Fusion works fine on my laptop with kde-unstable when started with FusionIcon, but I cannot configure the control center setting of: Personal -> Default Applications -> Window Manager -> Use a different window manager: Compiz custom (create wrapper script..... or Compiz The error message says the window manager failed to start reverting to kwin... Now compiz runs just fine on kde 4.3 (4.2.95-1) when started with FusionIcon, so it isn't a hardware/xorg issue. My question: "is this a kde or archlinux issue?" -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com

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