bjoernvold.com

hello all,

-- Initiate venting procedure --

it's been a while since i posted anything here. but recently my room mate bought a HTPC.
it is a really nice little machine with the AMD FM2 Chipset and of course one of them AMD APU's so he didn't have to buy an extra GPU (There wouldn't be any space either)

So we screwed the thing together and set up the hard-drives and the fan speed in the BIOS, so far so good. Now we were deciding what kind of operating system we were going to install.
We were already set on a linux distribution as a HTPC does not need to have bloat ware installed from the start (Windows). I had already downloaded Mageia 2 for test purposes in virtual box a few months ahead, so we went for it straight away.

The installation went trough beautifully and the OS booted. First impressions of the entire operating system was quite good, as we had not yet done anything. Lets open a browser and check if we have sound trough the HDMI.

And this is where a 4 days waste of time started.
Next step then was to install the graphic drivers, after all the sound gets routed through that when you want it to go by HDMI.
Firstly installing the AMD/ATI drivers through the package manager is no use, they are old, and are not supported for the AMD APU's. and for some reason they were difficult to activate through GUI. and sitting on a 47" LED TV 4 meters away with a wireless keyboard that works when it wishes i was not gonna jump on the CLI wagon, (If i wanted i would have installed ARCH and tinkered all i wanted there).
So of to the world wide web to fetch the beta drivers our APU (radeon 7000 series). The Beta drivers installed and now we had sound through HDMI, but with sound came a huge watermark down in the left corner on the screen saying "Test purposes only" or something in that alley.

Next; why is that watermark there when the graphics are now working as they should? Anyways i found a way of removing it by entering a signature text of 256 bit into a signature file located in /usr/share/ati somewhere.
Ok watermark was gone.

Next; let's install XBMC to get our media center up and running.

urpmi XBMC. JEY it works... wait what? no sound in some files? codec issues? ok lets fetch the codecs then.
of to the package manager to fetch the vlc-phonon package. vlc has all propper codecs right? WRONG! not in mageia. Mageia has it's own package repository which is not a part of the non-free package... HELL NO, that would have been logical, and we can't have that. after some google-foo i figured out that the package i was looking for was in the Tainted repository. Lets now try one of the files that didn't work earlier in vlc. hey it plays, with sound and everything.

Time to fire up XBMC again, lets play the same file there. wait still no sound, checking my phonon config is set to vlc, and that the video playes with sound in the default KDE video player (i believe it's totem). It plays there.
Now what could be wrong with XBMC, does it need it's own codecs to play the files? can't be there are no more XBMC packages available that i haven't already installed.

So putting that on the shelf for a while, we tried to plug in the S/PDIF of our 5.1 surround system. no sound... AT ALL!
going back to phonon, we test one of our devices, to see if it spits out any sound. Yes the test plays sound, but not the rest of the operating system.

Next; What do we do next. maybe try to set the default audio device through the asound.conf file in etc. after a quick confing and a reboot we had 5.1 sound, but not in XBMC.

Let's try to reinstall XBMC then, maybe it needs all the codecs under installation.

reinstalling XBMC...

launching XBMC... -> Black freezed screen that seems 100% unresponsive. i move the XBMC window around (windowed mode) and the image seems to update. i stop moving the window. complete freeze again..

after some configuring and reinstalling of XBMC i could not get the bloody thing to respond. I started setting up myth-tv and in the meanwhile i wanted some music. Time to install spotify (for those of you who don't know what spotify is. it's a music streaming application). i converted the packages from spotify.com into RPM packages and followed a guide on how to soft link the libs for Mageia. complete failure, and the libraries needed for it to run was not available through the package manager either.

all this back and forth ended today at about 19:00 when i tossed Mageia out and installed Linux Mint instead. The time is now 23:00 and the whole system is working with XBMC and everything, no extra modifications needed. In other words 4 days wasted on Mageia, about 4 hours invested in getting mint up and running as a fully qualified Desktop and Media center.

The moral of the story is: don't use Mageia for a media center, or anything that needs to use different sound channels (S/PDIF, HDMI, regular jacks), it is a complete and utter failure when it comes to Codecs, sound system, driver installation and boot speed (boot speed of the system was also slow).

phew

-- venting procedure completed --

Best Regards

That served you right as a punishment for not asking here first Mageia is understaffed and very fuzzy about the freedom so at least we would have pointed you to the Tainted repo right away.
Then you continue making the mistake by installing Mint

What you should have installed is Manjaro It comes with a load of unfree codecs - if you install the unfree version - and it is an easy to install Arch fork.
It has pamac that looks a bit like synaptic, It comes with Bumblebee and Yaourt installed out of the box. And it is fast
They keep their own repos -but if you like living on the bleeding edge you could easily change to "unstable" that would bring you as close to Arch as you can get.

Manjaro is a German Austrian French distro so naturally they have huge David Hasselhoff CD collections - but they also have made a good distro that is rocketing on Distrowatch (Top 10)

Mint is pretty good too (Manjaro has forked their installation system). But Mint is more bloated than Manjaro.

Good venting though

I guess, but a HTPC should be stable, and not updated that often. after all it will mostly be used for browsing and watching movies/series.
I thought i might aswell try Mageia, but as my post said, it's a failed distro. the main reason for wanting to try it was that it's on second place on distrowatch.

Linux mint i'm happy with though. It boots in 5 seconds (from POST to Desktop), it has Mate as the default desktop manager which seams like a good fork of gnome 2. The highest reason for choosing it would be that it uses ubuntu packages, in other words; a lot less tinkering.

My desktop PC on the other hand, i will probably install ARCH again. I was really happy with it the last time, until they broke my installation with the transfer to systemd.

Yes but Manjaro has the ambition to be stable hence the own repos. And it has access to all the latest software in the world if you so desire (AUR).
So I bet that you will find software in Arch or Manjaro that you cannot find in the Ubuntu repos.
Manjaro comes with Mate and Cinnamon too.
I get the stability argument though and I have to agree: Mint is more tested than Manjaro and has more people involved, and the Debian repos are usually a guarantee for stability.

This is all very funny to me. I just spent 4 months overseas with a 32" telly hooked up to an nvidia desktop server, with XBMC serving up the goodies, on Mageia 2. No hassle, no b.s., no fuzz.

HDMI? Didn't even need it... and the vid card was old on that thing; too old to have the latest Mageia drivers. We watched movies on it, we played console games on it, we played with console emulators on it, we listened to our tunes on it, watched BBC iPlayer on it, watched t.v. series on it, I could go on and on... was beautiful, really...

*walks off smiling and flicking nose

Mageia 2 with XBMC rocks... (but HDMI will be next.)

Oh, and I don't suppose anyone realizes that Mageia 3 is due out in 3 days?