[mythtv-users] Another ECS Liva Review

[Kirk Bocek]

Well, the beginning of one. I haven't even gotten to the Myth stuff yet.

But the hardware is cute. Basically an X86 Raspberry Pi. And at $100 
it's pretty close in price to a Raspberry Pi once you add storage, case, 
power, wifi, etc. to the Pi. All that is included with the Liva.

My first hurdle was that this device is UEFI booting only. Whatever 
distro you pick must be relatively recent. My problem was that my 
preferred install method is to PXE boot into the installer. However UEFI 
require a specific PXE setup. This might help those needing to 
reconfigure their server:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/s1-netboot-pxe-config-efi.html

Yeah, it's from Redhat, but the tools are pretty generic. I found my 
efidefault file needed to be in the root directory of the tftp server.

The other hurdle is that UEFI booting uses GRUB and not the older PXE 
notation. You'll need to adapt to it in your efidefault file.

So after getting that working, I found my preferred distro, CentOS, did 
not recognize the built in storage. Both CentOS 6 and CentOS 7. A short 
thread here:

https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=53524

The eMMC chips are just not recognized. So, being comfortable with 
Redhat, I installed Fedora 21. It recognized the chips just fine and 
Fedora21-Server installed without complaint.

So now I struggle with Fedora. The server package seems to be missing 
most of the xorg-x11 packages and much of the desktop stuff. We soldier on.