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So after struggling for a few more hours with Freevo and having some wrinkles with display that I just couldn’t figure out, I decided to give KnoppMyth another try (last tried it several versions ago) and was quite impressed with how everything ran out of the box on a PATA hard drive. Little did I know the fun I was in for when I tried to install on SATA.

I was definitely set on SATA for two reasons: my Raptor 10k RPM and Seagate 250 GB SATA drives! I wanted to use the 10k RPM drive for speed of interface startup and use the Seagate in an LVM volume to store TV shows. A couple of things I figured out from the KnoppMyth forums (once I found them and many hours playing around with the installation trying to get things to work:

0) Some really screwy errors came up when I tried to boot without SATA support (imagine that!?), but they were rarely the same, which made me think something else was wrong for a while.
1) You must do a manual install at this point to get SATA to work.
2) I have an nVidia SATA controller and although the installer uses the sata_nv.ko kernel module out of the box, the installed KnoppMyth system does not by default — you have to enable the module on startup.
3) LVM was a total piece of cake with KnoppMyth’s built-in create_lvm.sh shell script.

I will post more in-depth details when I am all finished. For now, here are some really useful links:

KnoppMyth home
LVM How To
mjl’s excellent post on nVidia kernel module enable

I guess the only things left to do are:

0) Get my Linksys WMP54G wireless card working with WPA-PSK and TKIP - it looks like I will be using ndiswrapper which was easy in the past on Fedora, hopefully Debian will be the same
1) Test the s-video output on my TV (man, I wish we had an LCD)
2) Test the DVD playing capabilities
3) Order that HTPC nice case I decided on and get everything wrapped up

Filed under: Technology