EGOPOLY

I wanted to add the Ruby gem “termios” which allows setting properties on a TTY so you can to single-keystroke input processing. I found a nice recipe for this here, but I ran into problems with Gems. I could have sworn that it was working fine (and I was right, it turns out.)

The error I got was: “can’t find ruby headers,” and it turns out to be caused by the latest XCode Update which has universal binary support. The fix is pretty mundane; just some symlinks so the headers will be found in the default place:

cd /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.0
sudo ln -s ../universal-darwin8.0/* ./

Now gems is happy again. This is all in 10.4/Tiger, BTW.

I’m in the middle of building a MythTV so I can have Tivo-like capability for high definition shows.

So far, I spent a lot of time getting the basic Linux system up and running… I chose Fedora Core 4, for no particular reason. I might end up trashing that and trying Ubuntu or Arch if I run into a dead end. I took an “old” (c. 2003) PC I had made for playing games. It has lots of RAM, a decent processor (P4/2.4) and should be good enough to at least learn about how to make a MythTV.

For now, I’m doing the “front-end” and “back-end” on the same PC, to simplify things. I got an HD-3000 high def tuner card from pchdtv.com. Hopefully that plus a remote-control device will be all I will have to spend on this.

The first real snag I ran into was getting the display to use the TV in full, native widescreen mode. I plugged the computer into the VGA connector on the TV (I wish the thing had a DVI input!), and had no luck using the build-in configs that were in.

Then I found this config on avsforum. It works pretty well. Here is the snippet from my xorg.conf file:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "SonyBravia"
HorizSync 47.7
VertRefresh 60
ModeLine "1360x768" 85.500 1360 1424 1536 1792 768 771 777 795 +Hsync +Vsync
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        Monitor    "SonyBravia"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes    "1366x768"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

I still haven’t actually got the tuner card to tune anything. Maybe next weekend.