It’s been a rather long weekend. Quite a number of computer problems cropped up.
The first was an ongoing problem with MythTV. I’ve been using it for 3-4 months now and it seems to work well… Except the system seems to be rather glitchy and the TV card would crash every 12 to 72 hours requiring a reboot. Since my mythtv box was also my secondary desktop and irc system it rather hurt my IdleRPG scores.
My idea to fix this problem was to try running the TV card off of my Server system which is more tested than my secondary desktop. I bought a second TV card and started working on it.
Debian proved not up to the task so I eventually gave up and switched the system to Ubuntu. (This being noteworthy because that debian system had been running without a reinstall since 1999.)
Running Dapper Drake Ubuntu (6.06) allowed the system to run with no problems at all. Mythtv was up and wasn’t showing all of the graphics artifacts I thought were normal on the old system.
I decided to try and run winmyth and dsmyth on my Windows system, Lain. I had just gotten it to show the picture (but no sound) when the system quietly ran down to a halt. Apparently either my power supply or motherboard went out on it.
So now I’m without a wintendo box. To make matters worse, that system also has the only games-capable TV card.
I also had a brief issue where the mythtv backend stopped talking to the database. I hope that was temporary
Contengency Planning:
If it’s the PSU I’ll buy a new one. Else, it’s time to part out the existing windows box and convert my secondary desktop to dual-use. Move the 1 gig to bebedora, move bebedora’s 512mb to ruri, then install a X-server on ruri and make it my new secondary desktop as well as my main house server. It only has an S3 Virge card, so that’ll suck. Lain’s CPU should work on ruri’s motherboard as well. I’ll have to start saving up for a new motherboard and that AMD64x2 chip I’ve been looking at.
On the plus side, i’ll get to see if it’s AMD64 Linux causing the problems with the 2 TV cards or if it’s a hardware issue in the GEFORCE 6100 combo motherboard chipset.