[tlug] Ubuntu / EPIA / Media Player

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

So, I spent some time this afternoon installing Ubuntu 7.04 on my little
EPIA box, in the hope that I can turn this into a media player. Some
questions:

1. Is it running KDE or Gnome? How does one tell, in general?

2. The graphics chip is a Trident CyberBlade/i1. What's the best
approach for starting to play with full screen video output on this, via
either the S-Video connector or at 1280x720 on the VGA output (which I'd
send directly into my projector)? Is there some clever tool, or should I
just get to hacking on the X11 config file directly?

3. What do I want to be using to play movies, music, etc? I installed
the MythTV package, and the music player accessory for it, but it
doesn't seem to give me any options beyond recording and playing back
television, which is the one thing I don't need to do, at least at the
moment, and configuration of MythTV seems cryptic, at best. Is there an
easy way just to aim it at a directory of media and make it play it?

4. I'm going to be running the thing headless, but I'm thinking it would
be nice to do a remote-desktop kinda thing on it. What's the best way to
set this up, do you think? Let it run the default desktop on the VGA,
and remote into it and share it? (I noticed some KDE thing for this in
the packages.) Set up a separate vnc X11 server without a real screen,
and use the vnc client on that? Log in remotely somehow? The first two
options would seem to have the advantage of being able to disconnect
from that session when I wander off with my laptop and reconnect later
on when I come back, which seems as if it would be nice.

A few impressions, while I'm at it:

1. It's very resource intensive; it really crawls on an 800 MHz VIA CPU.
It's probably doing a lot more stuff than my typical NetBSD setup (where
I use fvwm2), but it doesn't feel anywhere near as snappy.

2. The dmesg sucks: it's hideously verbose, gives you a lot of crap
that's extremely low-level debugging information ("sanitize start",
"Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)") and
doesn't even bother to give you things such as the CPU ID string.

3. No ssh server installed by default. Is it just me, or is that getting
fairly silly?

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974

Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com