[mythtv-users] Mythtv 31 on a Zotac Ion

David Watkins watkinshome at gmail.com
Fri Aug 14 07:36:55 UTC 2020


On Thu, 13 Aug 2020 at 18:27, John Pilkington <johnpilk222 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 13/08/2020 16:40, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> > On Thu, 13 Aug 2020 12:57:35 +0100, you wrote:
> >
> >> The SSD on my ancient standalone Myth box failed last night.
> >>
> >> It was a combined frontend / backend running Myth 25 on Fedora 16.
> Once I
> >> got multirec and DVB-T HD working I didn't see the need to upgrade!
> >>
> >> Recordings were on a separate drive and I have database backups but I've
> >> decided to do a clean install.
> >>
> >> I just wanted to ask if anyone has an opinion on whether v31 will still
> run
> >> on that hardware.  Initial impressions aren't good.
> >>
> >> Last night I installed lubuntu on an old 2.5inch spinning laptop drive I
> >> had lying around and installed myth from the repo.
> >>
> >> The GUI was freezing when recording HD.
> >>
> >> Now I didn't investigate at all and I was recording to the same old
> laptop
> >> drive as I put the OS on so there's much I can improve.
> >>
> >> I've ordered a new SSD and i'll be recording to external drives again.
> >>
> >> i'd just like to know if I'm wasting my time on that hardware - and
> would
> >> compiling from source give me a system better tailored to my hardware?
> >>
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance
> >>
> >> David
> >
> > How much RAM does it have?  Linux distros have been growing over the
> > last few years and the standard ones are typically not comfortable in
> > 2 Gibytes any more.  But MythTV is still fine in 4 Gibytes, unless you
> > have a monster database.  Having the GUI freezing may simply be
> > because old 2.5" laptop drives are very slow, even compared to modern
> > spinning drives, let alone SSDs.  And laptop drives are optimised to
> > stop rotating at the slightest chance, so if it had to start again,
> > the delay for that would be significant.  My mother was running
> > Xubuntu 18.04 and MythTV v30 on a 2009 Gigabyte motherboard with 4
> > Gibytes of RAM and it was fine unless she also ran Firefox and
> > Thunderbird, which made it swap a little bit.  I only had to upgrade
> > her PC a couple of weeks ago because it started to do CPU thermal
> > shutdowns when she played a recording for more than an hour.
> >
> > Your Ion was fine before, and so as long as it has at least 4 Gibytes
> > of RAM it should still be good.  If it only has 2 Gibytes, then you
> > may need to use one of the special distros that are less resource
> > hungry.
>
> This stirred dim memories of a long thread here a couple of years ago -
> nominally about an 'indoor antenna'    It might be worth searching for
> 'zotac ion linux nic support'  IIRC centos had dropped support for the
> nvidia nic.  It may be better now.
>
> John P
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>


Thanks for the replies.

The box only has 2GB RAM sadly, and the BIOS steals 512K of that( onboard
Graphics?), but one advantage of old hardware is I might be able to find
some DDR2 memory lying about the house somewhere.

I didn't have any problems with the NIC or any other hardware when I did my
test install yesterday, but I had to use quite an old version of the nVidia
driver (340 I think).

Anyway the SSD arrived last night so I'm giving it a go, and if that board
can't hack it then I'm on the lookout for new hardware.  I liked that ion
board because it was small and quiet.  GUI wasn't snappy but it was OK, and
the Video playback was pretty good.

Regards

D
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