A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

Shapeshifter · 2009-10-17 14:00:17

I failed. Here's the story:

About a year and a half ago I've bought a couple of components and put them together to have a relatively powerful, but still cheap HTPC that didn't eat too much energy, running at 40W in total. I also bought a dedicated TFT and hung it on the wall, so it's a bit like an internet kiosk as well, and it's really nice to play music from there. Looks really neat beside the TV. The TV is only neccessary to watch movies and look at pictures. I wanted to use it as a HTPC to watch movies, DVDs, have the music library on and use it as an always-on server for some stuff like mpd/icecast streaming and some files.

At first, I installed some shitty Vista, no idea why. Ran cygwin in the background but cygwin is no good at screen (not detaching manually would corrupt the session and make reattaching impossible). It didn't live long, as cygwin wasn't sufficient for my server needs. Though it performed well to watch DVDs, listen to music and watch pictures on the TV.

I cleared everything and installed Arch. With my non-linuxized family in mind, I chose KDE4 as the DE, so that lots of stuff comes preinstalled, like picture viewers, music players, DVD players and so on. But KDE4 just failed hard. Stuff didn't work most of the time, panel crashed randomly, kdm wouldn't do autologin but instead crash and I was unable to set the keyboard layout for kdm either. So I ended up using xinitrc to start it but still there was a lot of stuff going wrong. Besides of that, it was way too slow.

So I removed KDE and tried something more sane. Openbox and xfce4-panel. This worked fairly well, but one day the PC didn't react while I was away and my girlfriend just reset the box. After it had rebooted, all the xfce4-panel icons were back to defaults and had forgotten all their settings... And one day we had the mad idea to actually _rent_ a DVD and watch it, but it wouldn't work and I had to spend one hour googling for some mplayer error only to find out that there's some stupid copy protection on the DVD and that I needed yet another lib installed to play it, and using mplayer with some command line options, a task that my parents would not be able to do ever. So I would need to write another script that checks the DVD and uses some command line options accordingly...

I'm so sick of having to constantly research how to play some legally rented DVD or how icons disappear or the resolution randomly changes or all kinds of stupid stuff happening. Whatever my parents want to do simply doesn't work, and I have to come down and fix some stupid script or error. There's no end to the flaws in this system. Don't get me wrong, I'm using Arch on both my laptop and Desktop, and it runs great and I wouldn't want anything different, but for a box I'm not using everyday, where I'm not in control 100%, it seems like Arch or even Linux in general might not be working!

Now, what I'm going to try next is Windows 7 for the noob-friendly, DVD-playing family-part, and Archlinux on coLinux for the server stuff. Hope that arch runs well on coLinux. coLinux apparently runs on Win7 without issues.

Wish me luck.

pyther · 2009-10-17 23:59:32

Why don't you use mythtv? You can watch tv, dvds, view pictures, listen to music. If you want to browse the net you can have firefox open in another workspace. Maybe use a simple window manager such as openbox.

Berseker · 2009-10-18 06:47:42

A good alternative is xbmc. I've run in the past a very simple and pretty HTPC with an old p4+nvidia GF 5600Fx (well, until it got broken )

www.xbmc.org

pseudonomous · 2009-10-18 10:04:54

I'm not exactly sure what you need to do in terms of running a server, but maybe you could try running your server in one of VirtualBox/VMWare/HyperV? I've had a pretty good experiance running VMs in VirtualBox, but I don't use them for production serving ... I mainly use them for software / network testing.

jack.mitchell · 2009-10-18 12:22:01

Definatly check out xbmc. I left a box at my parents while I was working over summer that was hooked into thier HDTV which autostarted into xbmc. I came back it was still working and my whole family had found it a joy to use! If I i'm being honest I expected it to last about a week and then stop autostarting on some odd error or get corruptions from them not shutting it down properly. Running the svn version of xbmc is also a great idea, tons more features.

Jack.

QuimaxW · 2009-10-21 02:46:06

I can sympathize with you 100%. I'm actually relieved that someone else seems to feel the same way I do for a change!

For me, my home-built systems with no Windows license (Yea, I ditched the whole pirating thing years ago...) Linux w/ MythTV is a dream come true! However, I wouldn't *dare* put it in my parent's or in-laws living room. It's just too, um, quirky for that. I actually tend to find it slightly embarassing when others are over at my place and something as simple as playing a DVD doesn't 'just work' and I have to run around being Mr. Computer Tech just to get a DVD to play.

Don't get me wrong, I love my MythTV setup, but I can definity sympathize with your pain.

Obi-Lan · 2009-10-22 18:17:19

I ended up with Playstation 3... Streams music, movies etc from my fileserver, blueray support, hdmi, very nice UI (well some stupid desing for browsing files on local mediaserver) and somekind of browser for Internet surfing. And my gf can use it too.

Last edited by Obi-Lan (2009-10-22 18:18:06)

Shapeshifter · 2009-10-25 12:58:54

So, my experience with win7:

- generally better then vista, less bloated, but pretty much the same from a usability point of view
- still seriously unpractical and lame for a poweruser
- needs lots of tweaking to be good
- arch on colinux runs well and is _awesomely_ fast. Problem is that I find it a bit outdated with its 2.6.25 kernel
- arch in virtualbox runs slow because the box doesn't have IVT unfortunately (c2d E4500)
- Stuff plays and runs, but it's as usual. One has to get rid of all the annoyances like WMP, all the notifiers, updaters etc...

So, of course I'm ditching it. Now, I'll try ubuntu 9.10. Hopefully all its bloat will help the box to perform well without much tweaking.

I'll try xmbc, but generally I feel like all these myth* and other mediacenter linux distros/apps don't really fit my setup as the HTPC has an extra screen and is not only attached to the TV, so it can be used as a normal box really. Sometimes I'd write a quick letter on it and print it and all that. It's a versatile setup:
- playing movies, viewing images
- surfing
- torrents, downloading
- serving mpd/icecast streams
- gateway for wake-on-lan'ing and ssh'ing into my desktop
- attached to printer, used to write quick stuff

I'll see how ubuntu performs....

smartboyathome · 2009-10-25 15:39:57

Even though its probably not legal where you live, you should install libdvdcss, as that is the only way to watch many DVDs anymore. Also, make sure to install the gstreamer bad and gstreamer ugly plugins, as they contain some useful stuff for more obscure formats.

Kpunkt · 2009-10-27 19:49:33

What about a Mac? I think they're quite OK for the basic stuff (video i.e.)

Sucks hard for everything else, but thats why you have an arch installation ready

aaahaaap · 2009-11-25 22:42:14

Blame DRM and copy-protection for the non-working DVD's!

And if you need a decent HTPC try XBMC, you can run it in a DE as well (on the second screen).

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-17 14:00:17

A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#2 2009-10-17 23:59:32

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#3 2009-10-18 06:47:42

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#4 2009-10-18 10:04:54

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#5 2009-10-18 12:22:01

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#6 2009-10-21 02:46:06

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#7 2009-10-22 18:17:19

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#8 2009-10-25 12:58:54

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#9 2009-10-25 15:39:57

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#10 2009-10-27 19:49:33

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

#11 2009-11-25 22:42:14

Re: A failure running Linux on a family HTPC - or any OS for that matter.

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