[mythtv-users] Pundit/MythFE Distribution ready for testing!

[Steve Davidson]

My MythTV frontend distribution is ready for testing.  I have gotten
most of the functionality in place that I wanted, so am looking for some
feedback.

This release is mostly useful for those with Asus Pundits, but others
are welcome to try it out.

It contains the following components:

busybox-0.60.5
tinylogin-1.4
udhcp-0.9.8
openssh-3.6p1/openssl-0.9.7b
rsync-2.5.6
lirc-0.6.6
libirman-0.4.2
tnftp-2.0-beta1
zlib-1.1.4
kernel 2.4.20 with bootsplash.org patch 3.0.7
xfree86-4.3.0 (with Thomas Winischhoffer's latest X drivers)
mythfrontend 0.9

I managed to get the broadcom adapter working properly under the 2.4.20
kernel; the b44.o driver in the 2.5 kernel is still hopelessly broken. 
This release is built with a modular kernel to shave some additional
size off of the kernel image.

I am running the system off of an IDE-> CF adapter; boot time is approx
35 seconds from power on to mythfrontend availability. I'm currently
sitting at about 50 MB (uncompressed!!!) on a 64 MB CF card.

APM suspend is working with this release; I am still working on making
it resume and/or power up via modem ring over the serial port; anyone
with suggestions PLEASE drop me a line!

I am seeing good throughput on the Broadcom adapter once it is
initialized; it does take a few seconds to load the driver and
initialize the card.  DHCP is horribly slow with this adapter for some
reason, so I am recommending using a static address for now.

I looked at the Linux Progress Patch for a nice graphical boot, but was
not impressed.  I *really* don't like the idea of having to rebuild the
kernel to change the boot logo, and it is painful to configure.  Frank
Louwers recommended checking out Bootsplash.org, and I really like how
that project works.  The current version contains a SuSE splash screen;
I will update that sometime in the near future.

This version contains a primitive package mechanism for optional
components; I have created packages for mythfrontend 0.8 and 0.9 and
mythweather 0.8.  I'll be building additional packages in the near
future.  Should make it easier to handle updates.

I haven't gone through the dependencies closely yet, I'm sure that there
is still lots of excess baggage in this install.

4-in-1 card reader is still non-functional, as is SPDIF in/out.  This is
no big deal for me, but may be for others.

The distribution still needs some polishing, there are a few error
messages at startup (X startup in particular) that I want to clean up. 
Overall, however, I think that it is very usable.

Please let me know if you are interested in testing this distribution; I
need to gauge demand before making it available, as my hosting options
are pretty meager right now (anybody want to provide some web space?). 
The image is a hair under 32 megs compressed; it's just a dd image with
a single ext2 partition, so it can be flashed to (almost) any boot
medium.

== Steve