Cooking With Technology

Part 1: Mythbuntu HTPC and a Panasonic Viera

I purchased a 46″ Panasonic Viera 1080p plasma TV at the beginning of January, and the resulting fun I’ve been having with it is largely responsible for my lack of recent blog updates. I, being the cheap geek I am, have no desire to either pay for an HD package from my cable company, nor do I want to go out and buy an HD source and then buy or rent movies. The solution I came up with to view my existing media and new HD content thus revolves around a relatively cheap solution – a home theatre PC (HTPC). There were significant challenges in getting everything set up how I wanted it, and to prevent others from having to repeat my failures, I’m going to post a multi-part guide to repeating my final configuration – which looks a little like this. Part 1 after the jump!

Yes, that is 30 Rock in the background :)

Part 1: Computer Hardware and Operating System

I’m not cool enough to use Microsoft’s Media PC operating system, and being cheap, I wanted to use hardware I had laying around to construct my HTPC (sorry Apple TV). Recycling hardware and using Mythbuntu fit the bill perfectly. Luckily I had my old machine from high school laying around – while not the most attractive thing to have in the living room, it is packing:

• A 2.4ghz Pentium IV processor
• 1GB RAM
• an Asus P4P-800 motherboard
• a Hauppauge PVR-250 TV card
• a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card
• an Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card, and
• A generic 4x DVD+RW drive

Not a bad start at all, but it was lacking hard drives which I had canibalized for earlier upgrades, and a wireless card. The hard drive issue was easily solved by spending $110 at newegg on two new Western Digital 500gb hard drives. The wireless card was minimally more difficult – after doing some reading, I found out that Edimax fully supports Linux, which then made the purchase of an $18 Edimax EW-7128g wireless adapter especially easy. Because I didn’t want to control everything from a remote control, I picked up a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard to control the setup from my couch. The resulting final list of hardware is 100% Linux compatible, and fully capable of delivering 1080p video content.

The next step is to install the operating system. It was a very painless process and may be summarized in a few steps:

1. Downlaod and burn the Mythbuntu image
   
2. Boot off of the disc. On the Mythbuntu menu screen, select “Install Mythbuntu”
3. Follow the prompts, filling in data where needed. I partitioned manually, allocating 5gb for /home, 1gb for swap, and 10gb for /. The rest of the space on disk one was mounted as /storage1. All of disk two was mounted as /storage2. All filesystems (except swap) were formatted as ext3.
4. When asked to configure Mythbuntu, I did the advanced installation and selected the frontend/primary backend option. Because I don’t have (or desire) cable service, I skipped configuring channels, and because I don’t have a remote, didn’t grab the mythtv plugin for remote controls.
5. Continue following the installation tasks until a reboot is required, and tada! A basic installation is complete :)

That covers it for section one. None of this is really specific to the Panasonic Viera TV I own and neglects the problems I face, but rest easy, those are coming up. Section two will cover hardware issues I faced in getting everything set up correctly. Namely, setting up VGA->TV and getting the resolution set properly or DVI->HDMI and the issues associated with that, getting audio configured both in Mythbuntu and on the TV when using HDMI, and a couple other bits that are sure to keep you all riveted :)

If you don’t want to miss the next posts in this series, subscribing to my RSS feed is easy (just click on the orange icon on the top right of the page) and ensures my updates are delivered to you immediately. Until next time!

[Edit: part two is now available!]