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

[Henk Poley]

> Van: Max <max-mythtv-users at lasevich.net>
> 
> I am currently testing it via a hard drive. Yeah it is a bit noisier, but
> saves me the trouble of gettng CF. CD is probably not the best choice
since
> you WILL need to make a few changes to the OS.

Steve Davidson, could you make a version that loads it to RAM? It's not
that big. Unmount the partition and invoke hdparm so it shuts down the HD.
This way anybody can recycle an old HD for a frontend. Probably even
cheaper than CF + IDE converter?

It will still boot from CF and people can have a 'silent' system. Most will
not mind a 'noisy' bootup, I guess. Bads thing is that HDs tend to fail
when not used for a 'long' time.

Maybe split the kernel + modules to a 'floppy' image. You could then burn
it to CD and just pop it out after booting. A bit like Movix. Mythix?

> > Would anyone happen to know how to get this onto a CD from within
Windows
> > in order to test it? Does a .iso really have anything other than raw
data
> > in it? Fraid I don't have a writer on my Linux box and I'd rather test
on
> > CD before coughing up for the CF adapter...
> 
> BTW, i think the ISO is iso9660 format (thus iso) which is not exactly
raw
> data. However there is a "hard drive emulation" mode, which should make
this
> easier.

El Toritto HD emulation is quite cumbersome. Quite a few BIOSes implement
it wrong. Most of the time when you try to acces a floppy (also) it will
crash the system. All 'HD' access will be done thru BIOS, slowww. That's
why about all boot CDs as fast as they can out of the HD/floppy emu mode.

But off coarse this bootimage won't do any floppy access by itself, so you
are probably safe. Don't know if Nero (or any other) supports writing an
image as HD (normaly it would extract it from a partition). Someone want to
fiddel with mkisofs?

BTW, Steve why didn't you compile CD support in into the kernel? Probably
because you won't need it. But what overhead does it add? Could it
interfere with with something, or? Modules _are_ bigger on the disk, AFAIK.

Just some hints/request, I don't mean to push it or anything. I know how
irritating that can be... ;-)

	Henk Poley <><