Tom Purl’s Web Site

I apologize in advance for the corny, rhyming title

I’ve been using an Asus EEE PC 900 netbook for about a year now, and have used it mostly for light word processing and web browsing. I also have a MythTV server running in my basement on an old Duron-based system. I can do almost all of my personal daily work on the EEE PC, but when I need to do anything MythTV-related, I’m forced to switch machines.

This can be a pain, so I decided to try running the “frontend” for MythTV on my EEE PC. To my surprise, everything is working very well. It only took me about 5 minutes to install and configure the frontend software, and after that, I was able to do the following on my netbook:

• Watch live tv
• Watch recorded shows
• Edit shows (i.e. cut out commercials)

And the best part is that it’s all working very well over my wireless G network. Your results may vary, but at least it’s nice to know that this configuration works for some people.

Here’s some more information about my setup in case you want to try this yourself:

• My netbook has a 900 Mhz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a solid-state hard drive
• I am using the integrated graphics card made by Intel. Apparently, it uses the i810 chipset.
• I am serving up standard-definition television

And finally, a few caveats:

• I don’t know the limits of the video card that comes with my netbook. The highest resolution that I’ve tried is 1280×1024 on a 17″ monitor, and it looked pretty good. I have no idea how it would look at a higher resolution on a more regular-sized TV.
• I have heard that his netbook simply can’t display HD recordings. I’m not an expert on this type of thing (since I don’t have an HD TV or monitor), however.
• As with any hardware purchase, don’t buy anything based solely on a blog post or product review. This system worked well for me, but it could work terribly for you for a variety of reasons. Do a decent amount of research before you spend any money. For example, the MythTV wiki and mailing list are great places to do exactly this type of research.

It’s unlike me to upgrade my systems very often since it can take so much time, but I was moved recently to upgrade both my “server” (to Ubuntu 9.04) and my EEE PC 900 (to Easy Peasy 1.5). In general, I’m very impressed with how much better Linux-on-the-desktop gets every 6 months, and I look forward to at least another 8 years as a happy desktop Linux user.

One of the great things about Ubuntu is that it really is just painless to set up some pretty sophisticated servers. For example, I use my Ubuntu server to record television shows using MythTv, which can be very difficult to install. However, using the Ubuntu packages, I was able to get my system up-and-running in less than 10 minutes.

I do have one very small criticism of Ubuntu, and it’s that they keep making it harder and harder to install ffmpeg from source. The “stock” version of ffmpeg that comes with Ubuntu can’t do a lot of cool things like convert videos to the H264 format, so one of the first things that I usually do after installing Ubuntu is compile a more robust version of that application. Well, the process I used to compile it in 8.04 definitely did not work with 9.04 for some strange reason. Thank goodness that I found this tutorial, which made things very simple.

One really great thing about the 1.5 version of Easy Peasy is that I can now use some Compiz effects with my EEE PC 900. Previous versions of Easy Peasy didn’t even allow me to turn Compiz on. Hooray for tons tap-dancing sprites on my screen!

Here are some of the resources that I used to set up my Ubuntu 9.04 and Easy Peasy 1.5 systems. Maybe someone else will find them to be useful:

• Installing ffmpeg from source
• NFS Server & Client HOWTO