Airflow in my HTPC

Today I added a fan to my HTPC. When I removed the original PSU and put in a PicoPSU the only fan that was providing airflow through the case was also removed.

This was kind of the point of placing the PicoPSU as the fan was making way too much noise. However it also meant that all the hot air generated by the CPU keeps hovering around in the case.

That just doesn't feel right so I ordered this fan.
I made a small bracket to mount it on and fill the hole that the old PSU left behind.

Result after slowing down the CPU fan to the lowest possible speed: CPU temperature 35C and GPU temperature 45C.

Installing an SSD

Recently I made another fine addition to my Ubuntu powered desktop system: an SSD drive (more specific the 60GB version of this). Installing it took some tweaking and I'm not gonna take all the credit for this. This post describes exactly what I did, the posts above that one show the help I got.

I have to add that I changed the swap space back to the HDD. For some reason mounting the swap space on the SSD takes about 10s. I don't know why, so if someone has a bright idea: tell me, I'm all ears.

But now for the results (I used bootchart to visualize):
This is the bootchart with the HDD.

And this is the bootchart with the SSD.

Installing the SSD shaved about 10s off the boottime. Looking a bit closer reveals that this is almost completely realized by a much faster completion of ureadahead. The much higher throughput of the SSD is clearly taken advantage of.

Some stopwatch results:
With the HDD:

• 25s from grub to login
• 20s from login to Firefox ready to use

With the SSD:

• 10s from grub to login
• 12s from login to Firefox ready to use.

So again it makes quite a difference, although it's kind of a bummer that getting to grub also takes 10-15s. But this is the BIOS booting, so there's little I can do about that.

Besides a reduced boottime the overall user experience is better: every program starts faster, I have no way of measuring this though...

Some tweaks to XBMC

Okay so I re-installed XBMC live on my HTPC (my hard drive gave out).
Still some stuff just wouldn't work. Took me quite some time to figure it out. So I thought I'd post it here, maybe it's of some use for someone. I installed a LiveCD from XBMCfreak.nl.

First of all I had no sound whatsoever. I've now got sound over the optical cable (SP/dif). The settings I used:

- In System - settings - audio output:
- Optical/coax
- speaker 5.0
- all three buttons ON
- audio output device: iec958
- Passthrough output device: iec958

Before my hard drive crashed I had audio over HDMI (just to the TV) and over the optical cable. I'll have to look into that again... I'll post it when I've fixed it. For now at least I've got sound.

Secondly I had no internet connection. Turned out that some settings in the "interfaces" file were wrong. This is how I solved it:

- Check what connection is set in "interfaces" in /etc/network (eth0 or eth1)
- Enter "ifconfig -a" in the terminal on the XBMC machine. Does this match the settings in "interfaces" (both eth0 or eth1?)
- If not. Change the setting in "interfaces" to match the output of ifconfig and save. (If it is the same I guess you've got a different problem)
- Then enter "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" and it should be working.

Finally I wanted to change the keymapping for my remote. That wasn't too difficult:
Create a file named "keyboard.xml" in ~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps

In this file you can add/change the default settings by using this layout:

< .keymap>
< .global>
< .keyboard>
< .t mod="ctrl,shift">FullScreen< ./t>
< ./keyboard>
< ./global>
< ./keymap>

- Remove the space and period after each "<" I had to do this to prevent the browser of thinking it's html...

You only need to put the keys you want to change in this file. For the other keys the XBMC default will be used. For more info see here. The default XBMC keymap can be found here.

Hope it helps! Any questions: let me know. And also, if you've got a solution how to get sound over HDMI, let me know.

Customizing the looks of your Ubuntu desktop

After using the standard Ubuntu desktop layout for a while I found myself wanting a different look. And contrary to Windows or OSX the look of your desktop can be customized completely.

Every icon, bar, panel or window can be changed. Of course it's kind of a hassle if you'd have to do all this by yourself.

Although I don't like Apple's closed source business strategy, I do like it's design. So I made my Ubuntu Maverick look like OSX.

There's a very easy way to do this: MacBuntu.
Download, run the install.sh script and your Ubuntu desktop looks just like a Mac desktop, including the dock at the bottom of the screen. I have to mention I tweaked this install script a bit because I wanted to use Avant window navigator (available in the Ubuntu Software center) instead of docky. (I deleted all lines that were are related to Docky). Furthermore I did not want my top panel to change. Apple uses "global panel" a top panel that changes according to the application that is active. I've tried that on Ubuntu in the past and it wasn't a great success. I blocked the lines that are responsible for changing the panel set-up.

This is what my desktop looks like now:

You even get the sweet animations when minimizing a window:

Let me know what you think of it!

Annoying DRM

Sometimes using UBuntu can be quite frustrating.
Not because of Ubuntu itself, but because 3rd parties are not willing to support Linux in the same way as they are supporting OS X or Windows.

Take for example the Dutch TH channel RTL. They have a site where you can wathc episodes of shows that have already aired: rtlgemist.nl. The site uses MS Silverlight - for which a reasonable open-source version is available in Moonlight. So far so good, BUT ...

For some reason some shows are protected by DRM, which makes it impossible to view these shows using Ubuntu.

It seems quite hypocritical...

Because what OS is RTL running on it's server? Right, Linux...

VirtualBox

Tried Ubuntu yet? Annoyed by that one application that just isn't available for Linux and won't run under Wine? You probably got an old Windoze XP version lying around.

If so try Virtual Box. It allows you to define a virtaul PC on which you can install Windows XP.
This way you can run Windows in an Ubuntu Window and Windows won't even notice!

CD-rom USB everything works just as you'd expect.

Give it a try!

Spyder

Well, just upgraded to Ubuntun 10.10: works liek a charm and I quite like the (slightly) different look. But that's not what this - short - blog is about. It's about Spyder.

At work I often use Matlab, nice software but too expensive to - legally - use at home. But now I've found an open source alternative that might be able to replace it for a large part. At least for home use:

Spyder : "a Python development environment with advanced editing, interactive testing, debugging and introspection features. It is especially recommended for scientific computing thanks to NumPy (linear algebra), SciPy (signal and image processing), matplotlib (interactive 2D/3D plotting) and MayaVi’s mlab (interactive 3D visualization) support."

I've only been playing with it for a couple of days now, but I'm still enthusiatic about it.

As mentioned Spyder is IDE for the python programming language. The great thing about Spyder is - just like Matlab - that you don't have to compile your code to run it. I've got little to no programming experience outside of Matlab, but I found is rather easy to use Spyder.

So if you're looking for something like a home version of Matlab, give it a try!

Build your own HTPC

Okay, I get it, it's been a while. But Ubuntu has been performing excellent! Last week I had the first crash since installing Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04). That's one crash in 6 MONTHS! Try that with Windoze! And tomorrow Maverick Meerkat (10.10) will be released: http://www.ubuntu.com/

But now I've got a new project: a DIY HTPC.

The components:

• Zotac ION ITX-F-E motherboard
• 2GB of RAM
• MS Tech case
• Simple & cheap DVD player
• A 2 TB Western digital green caviar HD
  
• And, as the standard power supply from MS Tech is way too noisy for an HTPC, a PicoPSUwith a 24V adapter
  

The software: XBMC. XBMC was originally developed for the XBOX, however with the arrival of HD content is was ported to other platform amongst which: Linux!
To install XBMC I used the ready-made XBMC LiveCD from xbmcfreak.nl (Ubuntu is used as OS). It can't get any easier...

So what can it do?

• Clearly play almost all media content (photos, video (up to 1080p with surround sound!) and music)
• Automatically download artists biographies, movie plots, TV serie episode summaries,...
• Download from newsgroups or using torrents
• Watch "uitzendinggemist.nl" (the Dutch site to watch TV shows that have already aired) on your TV
  

Check the XBMC site to get a better idea of how slick it looks!