The Great Hardware Upgrade Of 2007 is still underway, but the end is getting closer. The new gaming box is fully set up and works wonderfully and…has been sitting in the corner, completely disconnected, for a few days now. Network, KVM connections, and desk space are limited and currently all in use, but I’ve pretty much finished moving data from the old Linux server to the new one, so I should be able to pull the old one out and move the new gaming box back in tonight.
I’ll still be waiting for a replacement for the broken drive for a week or two, but it was the second drive in the RAID-1 array in the new Linux server, so it can make do with one drive until the replacement arrives. The web and email services moved over easily enough, and MythTV was a lot easier to set up since there are prebuilt packages available for Kubuntu.
The major problem right now is that the TV-out doesn’t work so well on the new server. ATI cards just aren’t very well supported under Linux, and it took quite a while just to get it set up and working properly. The default configuration would crash the system until I disabled the GLX driver; the TV-out wouldn’t work at all with the default drivers; using the official drivers got TV-out working, but wouldn’t let me set it up as a separate screen at a different resolution; manually mucking with the configuration finally solved that, but then there were errors about DRI and Xv not being available; and I had to reinstall the drivers with special instructions to finally solve that.
Except that the TV-out is rather blurry, and doesn’t seem to scale properly when playing video via Xv. I’ll probably wind up just swapping video cards with the old system as well, since the old card has a much sharper TV-out picture, and the nVidia drivers are much more stable and I have a known working configuration for them.