General

Well after reading Diego's post about VMWare server I thought I would have to check that one out myself. I tried out Mike's original ebuilds in bug 56881, but haven't had chance to try out the updated ebuilds in the new bug he opened. I would like to thank Mike for all his work, the ebuilds worked fine on my dual core amd64 SMP system and I have been happily making a few test VMs with it.

This should be great for being able to play with bleeding edge environments in their own sandboxes and easily letting other people try out Gentoo without install whether they are using Linux or Windows. I just need some more disk space now!

Well I have booked my flights and hotel room, joined the American Physical Society and registered for their March meeting in Baltimore. I am feeling broke but really looking forward to seeing some of the American East coast (only ever been to California in the US). I am also looking forward to the jobs fair held in parallel to the conference. I will be polishing my CV and registering for the it pretty soon.

Managed to arrange for my wife to join me after the conference so that we can look around the area and make a bit of a holiday out of it. This is going to be a tough year writing up my thesis, searching for jobs, finishing up my current research and getting it published. I am really looking forward to looking around Washington DC too as it looks like a really amazing place. Drop me a line if you are in the area and fancy meeting up for a beer one night or have any recommendations of sights we should taken in.

Well I had an old motherboard with an Athlon64 3200+ in it (previous burnt out PSU that wasn't quite as bad as it looked). So I bought 1 GB of RAM, a new PSU, a Hauppage PVR-500, used my old nVidia GeForce FX5900XT and a DVD drive for it. I installed Gentoo amd64 on it of course and then began my first attempt at MythTV.

I have TV out working and I can play DVDs, although I am using xine instead of mplayer for the DVD menu support. The TV tuners are recognised but all I get is static. I was working with this wiki article. I also have messages like this in dmesg, ivtv1: i2c attach to card #1 ok [client=(tuner unset), addr=61] which I think is my tuner failing to get set up properly.

It looks like the infrared receiver/IR blaster doesn't work either, it is USB based and came with the package. I get ID 0609:031d SMK Manufacturing, Inc. when I plug it in but no lirc devices This means that the remote is also unusable. So far I have had limited success, but I am hopeful I will be able to improve and document the set up in future. I am currently using,

media-tv/ivtv-0.4.2
media-tv/xmltv-0.5.39 - current stable is unable to parse UK TV listings
media-tv/mythtv-0.18.1-r2
app-misc/lirc-0.8.0_pre3