[mythtv-users] Barebone myth tv nodes?

Robert Denier denier at umr.edu
Sat Aug 20 09:01:13 UTC 2005


I'm familiar with the EPIA motherboards, well the MII one anyway.  It
runs around $167, yet one obviously doesn't really need a pc card slot.
Personally if I'm going to get to those expenses one almost might as
well go Pundit or Shuttle cube variation I guess.  Actually I should
look at the variations on the shuttle cubes that are out now...

Basically I was looking for a solution in a microATX motherboard that
had everything quite cheap.  I just bought a refurbished microATX with
sempron 2200 and heat sink for $68.80 from newegg.  It hasn't arrive
yet, but if it's integrated video had s-video it would be perfect.  (Of
course they are sold out of those, and I've no idea of the quality since
it is refurbished.)  I just thought that perhaps there was an ultra
cheap all in one motherboard solution that basically needed a stick of
ram and a remote control.  It is not really an unreasonable combination,
but getting it all to work in Linux might be another matter.

If anyone does't know about them, they might take a look at
logicsupply.com .  They have ide flash memory modules that plug directly
into an IDE connector starting at $51 dollars for a 256MB version.  Of
course if you don't know how to build a Linux system so it never mounts
a partition rw, other than during development, then I can't really
recommend it.  (Flash memory devices have a finite number of read write
cycles.)

The basic idea is to create a compressed squashfs image and then use the
union file system to overlay a ramdrive so the system is happy.  If you
have a few files you need to edit every now and then put them on a
separate partition and create symbolic links to them before creating the
compressed image.  That way you can temporarily mount the partition read
write and edit those files.  For this to work with myth I suspect you
would need a 512MB CF module and at least 512MB of ram since you don't
have any disk swap..

I'm trying to think of the advantage of such a system over nfs and the
only obvious reason would be for portable devices that use wireless or
in cases where NFS booting is impossible.  Hard drives are far easier
and can be very quiet...  (I'm assuming the original reason for avoiding
a hard drive was for reasons of noise.)


On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 01:24 -0700, Todd Duffin wrote:
> I am running an EPIA M1000 and am very happy with it.  It is an ITX form 
> factor.  Has everything you are talking about.  VGA, SVideo out, Analog 
> audio out (and digital out too!), LAN, USB, Firewire, IR, 1000mhz CPU...the 

> 



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