August 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] lost-packages in testing/os/any/ @ FTP [season 2]
by Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi 18 Sep '09

18 Sep '09

Hi, First: There are some lost packages in testing/os/any/ in the FTP [#1] that are already moved to {core,extra}/os/any perl-anyevent-5.11-1-any.pkg.tar.gz perl-exiftool-7.86-1-any.pkg.tar.gz perl-io-socket-ssl-1.27-1-any.pkg.tar.gz perl-libwww-5.829-1-any.pkg.tar.gz perl-test-pod-1.40-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-bibtexextra-2009.14680-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-core-2009.14682-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-fontsextra-2009.14419-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-games-2009.13822-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-genericextra-2009.14264-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-htmlxml-2009.14086-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-humanities-2009.13530-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-langcjk-2009.14619-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-langcyrillic-2009.14075-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-langextra-2009.14322-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-langgreek-2009.14450-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-latex3-2009.14222-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-latexextra-2009.14694-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-music-2009.13822-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-pictures-2009.14620-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-plainextra-2009.13715-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-pstricks-2009.14633-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-publishers-2009.14558-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-science-2009.14678-1-any.pkg.tar.gz wireless-regdb-2009.08.05-1-any.pkg.tar.gz ------------------------------------------------------------------- Second: These two packages are still on testing, while the rest was moved to extra texlive-formatsextra-2009.14435-1-any.pkg.tar.gz texlive-bin-2009.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz Good Luck! [#1] ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/testing/os/any/ -- 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] since the fglrx legacy driver is now static - any will to make a run at getting it to work?
by David C. Rankin 12 Sep '09

12 Sep '09

Listmates, One shortcoming that really irks me (and a whole lot of other laptop users) is the lack of an ATI driver for the meager hardware on most laptops. I don't know what the statistics are, but just from an educated guess standpoint, I bet that 50-65% of the current (in use and less than 3 years old) graphic adapters in laptops is ATI. (either Xpress or mobility Radeon chips). The difference in performace between using the radeonhd driver and the fglrx driver is 6-fold, only made that much worse by kde4 demands on the graphic subsystem. I don't know if there is any political/developer will for this, but for a majority of the ati laptop hardware out there (and desktop for that matter), we have the fglrx driver that is now static as of the 9-3 (version 8.953) release of the "legacy" driver with ATI abandoning driver support for all pre 2400 series cards. In the past, the main reason for not supporting the ATI driver (not just Arch) was that it was too much of a moving target, requiring considerable work on the distros part to keep up with library changes, etc. Now with the driver static, I wonder if it might not be worth looking into to see if it is even feasable to try and make it work with the current arch setup. ( I know I'm not smart enough in this area to be of any use. ) The reason I bring this up I running arch on one drive I have for my laptop, and I'm limited to the radeonhd driver. It's getting better, but it has two achiles heels: (1) performance, and (2) heat (lots of it). Ultimately, the radeonhd driver will crack the black box and have a great driver, but currently, the combination of the issues is bad enough, I keep an old copy of suse 11 on another driver for use in my laptop, for no other reason than it has the working fglrx driver and I can work with my laptop without the fan noise and heat under my left palm caused by the lack of downclocking/powerdown of the unused gpu circuitry experienced with the radeonhd driver. I don't know if it is even worth looking into, but I do know that for laptop users, if Arch had a working fglrx driver, that would be one key point a lot of laptop users would be willing to switch for. Just a stray thought, so take it for what its worth. As for the current, still maintained, ATI driver for 2400+ series cards, good luck, it's still moving pretty fast.... -- 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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[arch-general] Stuff in /etc/cron.d/ won't work?
by Sven-Hendrik Haase 08 Sep '09

08 Sep '09

Hey there, I just noticed that I just couldn't get cron to properly execute stuff in /etc/cron.d/ no matter what I did. Let's say I have /etc/cron.d/lol with this content: * * * * * root echo "lol" >> /tmp/omg and restart crond afterwards, the crond log tells me that cron actually runs this command every minute without a problem. Sadly, this isn't the case and the file at /tmp/omg is created but remains without contents. In contrast, if I put an executable script to /etc/cron.hourly/lol with the content: echo "lol" >> /tmp/omg then the file at /tmp/omg fills up with lots of "lol"s after a couple of hours. It also works fine if I put it into the crontab. Now, I'd like to be able to use /etc/cron.d/ as well because it seems more transparent to me. Is there anything I do inherently wrong? -- Sven-Hendrik

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[arch-general] LaTeX problems ?
by Piyush P Kurur 03 Sep '09

03 Sep '09

Hi, latex which was fine till last update is having an unmet libpoppler dependency. When I tried to install libpoppler then the complaint was that they are not in the correct format. So I guess the following needs to be done. 1) Add libpoppler as a dependency to latex 2) recompile libpoppler with latest gcc which ever it is. I can file a bug report but since the server is down I will wait. Meanwhile did any one else also notice this problem ? Regards ppk

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[arch-general] A little weirdness at boot time
by Andre Ramaciotti da Silva 02 Sep '09

02 Sep '09

Hi all! This email is divided in two parts: a curiosity and a problem. They are somewhat related, so I'm writing both together. The curiosity: Since I've installed Arch Linux in this notebook (in March), the time it takes to load the modules highly varies. With the current archinit scripts, it ranges from incredible 150ms to incredible 10 000ms. With the older archinit scripts, the time weren't exactly the same, but it did vary a lot, too. At first I thought a "cold boot" would take more than a reboot, but both things are completely unrelated: a cold boot can take only 150ms and a reboot 9 500ms and vice versa. I don't see this as a big problem, I'm just curious to know why. If anyone thinks I should report a bug, tell me what other kind of piece of information would be useful and I'll do it. The problem: Completely unrelated to the question above, the wireless card sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. It's unrelated because if the boot takes 150ms, the wireless may or may not work. The same applies if the boot takes 10 000ms. When I say it doesn't work, I mean that netcfg will fail and print an error: 'eth0: interface doesn't support scanning' Yes, I know it's weird, but I'm using the broadcom-wl module, and it sets eth0 as the wireless card. My cards: 09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 12) 0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01) and my MODULES array in /etc/rc.conf: MODULES=(!b43 lib80211_crypt_tkip wl ...) TIA, Andre

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[arch-general] Howto adjust font scaling in Arch? All fonts look a bit big and fat?
by David C. Rankin 02 Sep '09

02 Sep '09

Listmates, I'm looking for a way to adjust the font size scaling (no not the control center font size) so all the fonts in my kde4 desktop look right. Basically, in Arch kde4 on my laptop, all fonts look 1pt too big. Case in point, on suse, I have all my desktop fonts set to 9pt, but with Arch, I have the size set at 8pt and they still look bigger than the suse fonts (same fonts of course, same subpixel hinting setting, etc...). Is there somewhere that some type of scaling is done that I can tweak to try and fix this? The effect of the larger scaling makes everthing from the kmail message list to the basket notepad fonts look cramped. Any thoughts? -- 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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Re: [arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Integrity Check i686 of core, extra 28-08-2009
by Henning Garus 02 Sep '09

02 Sep '09

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 01:57:19PM +0200, Xavier wrote: > > Maybe there should be a separate simple tool comparing pkgbuild tree > vs pacman databases (vs packages on ftp/rsync) to make sure everything > is in sync. > But I will need some more details about what the information we > currently have to make this possible. > Afaik ftpdir-cleanup already takes care of the pacman databases vs ftp > packages part so we really just need the pkgbuild tree vs pacman > databases part to fill the gap. > Something like this? Generated from a recently synced ABS tree and latest DBs from ftp.archlinux.org . ================================================================================ Results for core ================================================================================ ================================================================================ Results for extra ================================================================================ Found in PKGBUILD tree, but not in DB: daemontools kdemultimedia-strigi-analyzer pwlib ================================================================================ Results for community ================================================================================ Found in DB but not in PKGBUILD tree: klogwatch png2ico urlgrabber Found in PKGBUILD tree, but not in DB: audacious-itouch-control cairo-docs clearlooks courier-pythonfilter dbus-glib-docs dillo-i18n ec-fonts-mftraced ftpmonitor kpacman nautilus-audio-convert perl-extutils-parsexs php-xdebug pyclamav pydns pyspf rkhunter syncekonnector tracker-gnome-search-tool twisted-words

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Re: [arch-general] offlineimap
by Daenyth Blank 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 12:08, <jozefk(a)gmx.com> wrote: > @ Loui Chang > What was wrong with my signature? :) Anyway thanks for suggestion. It's only > 2 lines now :) If your sig is longer than your actual message...

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Re: [arch-general] offlineimap
by Andrea Scarpino 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

On 31/08/2009, jozefk(a)gmx.com <jozefk(a)gmx.com> wrote: > I can't find out the way to start offlineimap automatically each time I > start KDE. I tryed with ./kde4/Autostart and shell script but it didn't > work. > Is there any other way to run in autoamtiaclly in KDE or I must to > always start it manually? Hi, $ ln -s /usr/bin/offlineimap ~/.kde4/Autostart/ doesn't work? -- Andrea `bash` Scarpino Arch Linux Developer

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