Old Joggler Ubuntu Image

[manaesh]

Hi Buzz

Hoping I wont have to use it - but do you have a copy of an Ubuntu 11.04 image hanging about anywhere??

Long story 0 but having issues with mythtv (not joggler related) and may need to revert to a backup - which is only supported up until 11.04......

Cheers

Mike

[BuZz]

I have the root filesystem still. no new kernel etc, and improvements for some time on that. its possible to build an image, but I dont have time right now - what's the mythtv issue btw ? (I like long stories).

[manaesh]

Hi Buzz

Dont spend any time on it - just wondering if you had the image anywhere...

Well - if you like long stories!!!!

I run a mythtv system, with 4 frontends, (one of wich is the kitchen joggler - whose sole duty is to provide livetv for the kitchen) and its connected to my backend in the loft with 4 dvb-t2 & 2 dvb-s2 tuners, and over 10tb of storage on a SOFTWARE mdlm raid (and we have used 6tb of it so far..)

The system (including the joggler) has been near bullet proof, with only the occasional tweak needed, which has been good seeing as we have had a new addition to the family, and she is taking up most of my spare time... And she also loves some of the Mickey MOuse content, but thats a different story!

When i built the system, i settled on the lastest version at the time, 10.10 and built mythtv from the mythbuntu repos. As i later found out, mythbunu only supports upto mythtv version .24 on the repos for 10.10 - and there is no further upgrade path...

I left everything at mythtv 24 for a while, but due to some other external issues, and that the latest version of mythtv has some great new features, and the fact that i just love to tinker, i decided to upgrade my backend from 10.10 to 11.04 & then to 11.10 and finally 12.04.1 LTS for some long term support goodness!!

Obviously, as this is a production system in our household, and getting downtime agreed by "the boss" is extremely difficult, i wanted to make sure everything worked first time and correctly during the upgrade and that i wouldnt be left with a non functioning system....(and a very annoyed Wife & daughters)

I started by creating clonezilla images of all the backends/frontends, so that i can go back to a known good point, and that i can also spin up these images in a virtual enviroment, and check that the upgrade goes to plan on all machines - if its all ok - i could then upgrade the production system safe in the knowledge that it SHOULD work, and if not ive got a point in time backup to go back to.....

The only machine that I ould not get a clone of was the Joggler. Probably due to the fact that it was brtfs, and that i had cloned it from a USB stick to a SSD when i needed some more space, and extended the partition to make use of the new space, but it had not worked properly, with the OS always reporting that the 128gb SSD drive was only 16gb - and i couldnt sort that one out....and in trying to get a clone of the machine, i managed to do the opposite, and kackered the boot process, so that i had to completely rebuild it...

So - when i did the main upgrade, i also rebuilt the joggler to the latest standard in parallel.... I tried you xbuntu image first, and that looked good, apart from the fact that my homeautomation software would not work properly on it (runs a windose executable under mono..) I tried your ubuntu image - and that worked, but performance was a bit limited, and it kept crashing. So i then used your base image, with lubuntu, and that worked very well, apart from the screen server (the other thread)

So - the main upgrade looked like it went smoothly, and i was now running 12.04.1 on ALL machines - and intial tests looked good.

However, during extended testing, it became apparent that i had a major issue - tv programs were recording without issue, and playback of these files were fine, however, livetv playback and recording and live playback of programs failed randomly, dumping me out of mythtv. (so written programs were OK, but programs that were read/write failed.)

Unfortuantely at this point, as I had changed so much - it was going to be a right pain in the ^$%£$ to find out exactly what went wrong. so i might have rolled back... but i didnt want to , as 10.10 would be lmiting going forward....

So - after a lot of poking about and driver changing (for the TBS dvb cards)over the course of two days - it turned out that it seemed to be disk IO that was causing me the live TV dropouts, possibly coupled with a lower signal quality due to all the wind and rain over the last couple of days... IOSTAT reported a constant RW and hovering around 80% utilisation of the SOFTWARE raid array.

I had virtualbox running 3 important VMs off my SOFTWARE (mdlm) raid, so moved that onto a seperate box, and imediatly i started seeing less droppouts written to the mythtv log, and livetv started running again... Its now been a day of running livetv with no dropouts - so i would like to say i have got to the bottom of the issue - IOSTAT now reports that the riad is hovering around 40% utilisation.

So to conclude - during the update, something changed in the software raid, virtualbox version (4.1 to 4.2) and generally mythtv - to tip my server over the edge. Moving the virtualbox VMs brought it back under... and harmony in the household was restored, as we can now watch eastenders whilst doing the washing up.

It should be noted that the first two problems did not show up (and cant) during virtual testing - so my lesson learned (and I specalise in virtualisation to put food on the table) is dont always trust virtual upgrades!!!

Anyway - was a bit of a long post! Keep up the good work Buzz - we all give you thanks in our household!!!

Cheers!!!

Mike

[pete]

Mike,

Curious what you are using for the back end live TV stuff.

Here I am using MythTV connected to 5 tuners and have issues with it and XBMC. (latest MythBuntu and most current XBMC - keep getting DB errors).

Related to the Joggler I can stream 480 well but 720 is a bit jittery.

What are you using to stream live TV on the Joggler connected at 1Gb?

I have no issues with recorded 480/720 content. I am using a "few" Aopen DE's for XBMC on other LCDs in the house but want to add the Jogglers to the mix.

I am also getting ready to test a Rasberry Pi XBMC setup to the smaller Kitchen LCD. That said the TV is flush to the wall and I want to put the RP behind the LCD (already have a network connection in the recessed box behind the set). This experimental to just play with.

[manaesh]

Hi Pete

I use a cobbled together backend server - which contains a Core 2 Duo 2ghz CPU, 8gb of ram, and 6 x 2tb seagate green hdds. I use TBS video cards - 2 x 6820 for DVB-T2 & 2 x 6921 for DVB-S2 related stuff.

Looking back at my notes - I installed originally by installing Ubuntu Server, then xfce desktop & then installed mythtv-backend from the standard ubuntu repos. I then enabled mythbuntu repos to bring everything up-to date.

I must admit - i haven't had any database issues - and everything has more or less been rock solid. Like you - I only stream 480 stuff over a 1gig connection - 720 just doesnt work. Livetv on the joggler works a treat - I watched the entire Grand Prix yesterday on FTA BBC1 SD without any issues for 3 hours. Can you elaborate more on your issues?

I also have 2 raspberries that I am looking to play with. The latest version of http://www.raspbmc.com/ now includes the mythtv PVR addon - i have very quickly tried this - and it seems to connect, but i have not had time to investigate it further - as this upgrade has been taking up most of my time. Its next on the list to take a look at!! Its what the Pi was made for! Ill update this thread with how i get on!

Cheers

[BuZz]

so everything is working with 12.04 + lxde desktop ?

Not sure why there was a problem with the latest xubuntu image, but I can only assume it was a compatibility thing with the latest mono etc perhaps. For your system it sounds like 12.04 would be a good version, as it is a lts release.

nice set up you have. I take it a lot of tv gets watched in your house

I think I watch about 2 tv programmes a week, but I do like films. Just using a virgin TIVO box, which has decided it doesn't want to record anything from my wishlist. PoS.

[pete]

Here I do not really watch TV but want the ability to have it everywhere anyways.

My wife does record everthing and she is always timeshifting. (BTW saw a movie called "Loopers" the other night...imagine making time travel illegal?)

We did have two Tivos for many years. That said our satellite provider "forced" us to upgrade to their PVR (its really a downgrade from the Tivos).

That said I don't record anything and my wife is happy.

I am currently running the newest released MythBuntu. I have two analog digital HD tuners in it and using one HD (with 3 tuners) externally. I also have an old Nexus Satellite card that I want to add to the mix. I can see TV fine via MythTV player but having issues with XBMC.

Most (all now) over the air / cable stuff here is HD except for the older TV shows which are still SD. How are you telling MythTV to stream only SD?

This are the links that I am "testing" the XBMC PVR functionality with MythTV. It still is not working right though I am only testing it with Wintel on the clients at this time and should give Linux a try. I did build a separate MythTV combo back end server dedicated to MthTV and SB. It is doing well. I fit the hodgepodge set up on an mITX core duo made for media server style motherboard in a smaller mITX HT media center box.

The newest XBMC now has built in PVR/Timeshifting functionality. It is here:

First I install the XBMC PVR Binary from here:

http://xbmc.opdenkamp.eu/

Then I update with the XBMC most current nightly build and MyTV PVR build. (it is not working yet for me).

http://www.dotnetdevelopers.net/XBMC/xbmcpvr.html

I have the originally posted Joggler Ubuntu 11.04 image here:

I just finished my new 8 slot NAS Raid box. I am using an Asus E35m1-I with 8Gb of memory. This motherboard has 6 SATA ports on it. I did though add an cross flashed IBM M1015 SATAIII 8 port card to it. It was a bit of a hardware mod to get it to fit in the tiny case. I did have issues with it in IT mode and reflashed the IBM M1015 to IR mode and upgrade the BIOS on the Asus motherboard. It works fine now. Only thing is that the motherboard has a Realtek NIC Gb NIC on it and I have read that it is really not a NIC to utilize for a NAS box. That said though I am just starting to populate the NAS box and found 4TB SATA III hard drives on sale this past week. I am starting to "collect" HD movies and they do utilize more space than the SD movies. (IE: each of my HD MKV movies use up 1.5-18 Gb's of space versus the SD at under 1 Gb of space). I don't even play Blu-Ray disks as I never turn on the Blu-Ray player; instead just archiving them to MKV right away and stream them from the NAS box. Here is a picture of my originally testing and now production 8 drive NAS box...smallest footprint I ever saw....purchased directly from vendor in China. I have not seen them being sold here yet.

[BuZz]

I have packages for my ubuntu distros for XBMC frodo here btw - https://launchpad.net/~jools/+archive/joggler-testing

the current retouched skin doesnt include the PVR stuff yet afaik.

[manaesh]

so everything is working with 12.04 + lxde desktop ?

Not sure why there was a problem with the latest xubuntu image, but I can only assume it was a compatibility thing with the latest mono etc perhaps. For your system it sounds like 12.04 would be a good version, as it is a lts release.

nice set up you have. I take it a lot of tv gets watched in your house

I think I watch about 2 tv programmes a week, but I do like films. Just using a virgin TIVO box, which has decided it doesn't want to record anything from my wishlist. PoS.

Hi Buzz

Everything is working tickkety boo now. Running 10.04.1 LTS on the joggler with Lubuntu frontend. The main mythbackend is also running 10.04.1 LTS as well. After being bitten by 10.10 - I am only ever installing LTS releases from now on!

The joggler is rock solid, and I have a key assigned to change screen between mythtv & my home automation screen (homeseer) - it works really well.

We do watch a bit of TV, but as ever, we record more than we ever watch! I like mythtv as it means when I have some spare time, I can watch exactly what i want, and not just the dross that is on at that time!!

Go for mythtv you know you want to!!!! - you can even have a copy of my customised image

Cheers

Mike

[manaesh]

Most (all now) over the air / cable stuff here is HD except for the older TV shows which are still SD. How are you telling MythTV to stream only SD?

Ah - good point - I am not actually telling mythtv to do that - I am just watching the SD channels directly (most stuff is still simulcast over here).

Nice NAS box! My homebuilt one is almost full now - going to have to add in another SATA card - ive used all 6 ports on my MOBO..

Thinking about getting some of the new 4tb drives when the prices come down a bit - could then have 25tb of storage to fill up with TV!!!!

Have fun

Mike

[pete]

When I watch streaming TV here I mostly watch older television from the 1960's; much of it was in black and white. (default SD though).

The local TV cable company here offers "rental" SD boxes to downconvert their HD stuff with a monthly rental; similar to what they do with the HD stuff calling it a "premium" even though it is broadcast by default charging for rental boxes. (slowly moving to the "a la carte" TV mode here).

I am rebroadcasting internally two legacy SD channels (many years now). It was done for my wife mostly. I had upgraded the kitchen / laundry rooms to LCDs but kept the rebroadcast of the TV stuff such that I run one BB cable to the LCD and inject two channels into it such that it gets a variety of stuff. That and I IR blast the Tivo controls to other rooms. (primitive stuff though). Such that my wife wanders typically from the kitchen to the laundry room while watching the three LCD TVs.

I did find the legacy 12.04 Ubuntu release of the Joggler image if that is what you were looking for?

I do recall that one did run the HSTouch linux client "out of the box".

The 4TB Hitachi drive is on sale here now for $180 USD which is a decent price.

Check out the cross-flashing stuff on the IBM M1015. I purchased this card for around $50 USD on ebay.

http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/

[BuZz]

Everything is working tickkety boo now. Running 10.04.1 LTS on the joggler with Lubuntu frontend. The main mythbackend is also running 10.04.1 LTS as well. After being bitten by 10.10 - I am only ever installing LTS releases from now on!

so the 12.04 lts didn't work for you ?

[manaesh]

Sorry - mistyped!

All running on 12.04.1 LTS

Need a new keyboard!!!!

[ilovemyjoggler]

Pete

I'm avidly reading this but not understanding any of it. Which is fine as I certainly won't be taking this on as a project. There was a time when I wanted to rent a spare room from BuZz to use his superfast broadband but I have changed my mind. I want to live in your tv tech-filled house!

[hawsey]

If you search through the posts you will find I have first dibs on that one lol.
I still live in hope of fostering /adoption by Pete or failing that maybee just living Harry potter style under the stairs (bound to be some tech in there too) .
Maybee we could pretend to be twins and hope for a double adoption.

[ilovemyjoggler]

hawsey, hello stranger!

Twin adoption would be great although Pete's house sounds large enough for us to have a proper room.

Yeah...i'm sure his house will have tech in every conceivable nook and cranny!

[pete]

Thanks folks.

Its been very quiet here lately with both kids (not really kids anymore) out of the house and in their own places.

ilovemyjoggler
MythTV is a Tivo like free piece of software that streams live TV or recordings. You can "time shift" with it; IE: you can pause live TV; then play it where you left off. MythTV functions as the backend PVR. XBMC functions as the front end for all kinds of stuff including the recordings et al.

Its really just the old XBMC now with new PVR functionality.

By the time I get all of this sorted out I will be most likely 80 years old and will be asking what day of the week it is...and be eating through a straw....