Digital TV on Linux with a Pinnacle USB stick
Sunday, November 02 2008
My laptop is now running Intrepid Ibex, and in a moment of curiosity, I decided to try my Pinnacle nano stick.
It works fine with VLC (but not with xine, Totem, mplayer or Kaffeine). I have to use the house aerial, because signal strength just isn’t good enough with the little one that came with it. Still, it’s pretty neat. As a result, I can now get HD television via Freeview.
There is the odd rendering glitch. This laptop is lacking in CPU grunt and signal strength is not good so it’s hard to say where the fault lies without more detailed investigation than I have time for right now. I also noticed that it worked much better with Compiz turned off.
Here is a channels.conf file for the Wellington area which I created. You can open it in VLC and channels will appear in the playlist.
Tags: dvb ~ linux ~ wellington ~ digital television ~ freeview
Setting up a dual head gutsy box with ati
Wednesday, April 16 2008
It took a little while to get a second monitor set up today. I’ve never set up a dual head Linux box before, and I’ve learned a few things in the process:
- the preferred way changes fast enough that the top results in Google can be rather out of date.
- although it looks as though the Gutsy screen administration tool will work, it doesn’t.
- xrandr is currently the way to go.
- there are reasonable instructions on the Debian XStrikeForce wiki, whereas the Ubuntu forums etc are hopeless. Go Debian.
- you don’t get any Compiz eye candy if the virtual desktop size is big enough. This is to do with memory limits on the video card, so no quick fixes either.
Still, it takes me back (in a pleasant way) to the days when I had a dual head Mac years ago, with my markup on one display and the rendered result in the other. Although System 7 got it right straight away with no fooling around…
Tags: gutsy ~ linux ~ xrandr ~ ati ~ dual head ~ ubuntuThursday, April 10 2008
In the whole time I’ve been a Gnome user, which would be several years now, I don’t think I’ve ever seen gnome-system-monitor use less then 5% CPU on average.
I have a honking fast box with lots of RAM here, and gnome-system-monitor still registers on its own display. Contrast this with the humble top, which rarely uses more than 1%.
It seems to me that when you actually want a system monitor is when your system is under heavy load. In which case the last thing I want to do is fire up a new app that materially adds to the problem.
Tags: linux ~ gnome ~ oddityMore webcam success on Ubuntu Gutsy
Saturday, December 01 2007
Flushed with the pleasure of my last purchase, I bought another webcam from Dick Smith Electronics, so that I could set up video conferencing on the PC upstairs. This webcam was on special for $20. It is a DSE XH5221. And I got it working. The chipset turns out to be a Pixart PAC7311, which shows up in lsusb as usb id 093a.
It didn’t run on Ubuntu Gutsy straight away, but it turns out that there is a newer version of gspca that supports it, and I was able to download and install it. There are some nice step-by-step instructions here.
The picture quality is pretty bad, to be honest. Way too contrasty, and with distinct blocky artifacts. However, I can live with that for $20, and I am going to fool with the driver source to see what I can do.
I’ve tested it with Skype, motion, cheese and camorama – works with all of them. I also discovered that if you have been using another USB camera since boot time, all of those programs can get confused (or maybe it’s a V4L problem). But as long as you haven’t plugged another webcam in first, this one works fine.
Tags: webcam ~ linux ~ ubuntu