Moved back to Windows from Linux

[mahcsm]

I just felt I should post my Linux experience so that someone else may benefit. I am long time Sage user and major proponent. I have put a lot of money into my whole house Home Theater system - in which SageTV is the core. 3 months ago, I decided to move from Windows to Linux for two reasons; 1) hopes of making a more stable system; and 2) to move away from the MS bloatware that is Windows. I am not a Linux expert by any means, but I have toyed with it over the years, and I am very savvy at researching what I need to know in order to make things do what I want them to do. So... I stared with the recommended Gentoo build but quickly found that this build did not support my Addonics eSata card which support 3TB of RAID 5 Storage. I then went with Ubuntu 8.1 Server AMD64 - it passively supported my Addonics card (meaning it recognized all drives connected to my eSata muliplexer (I had to use mdadm for RAID - which is fine). After a week of tinkering., I got a stable environment and then found I had all kinds of JRE problems, thus SageTV problems, associated with the 64bit OS. I went for the the 32 bit version of 8.1 Ubuntu, and found that the disk image gave me all kinds of boot problems (some sort of bug n the build). So then, I went with Ubuntu 8.04 32 bit and got everything running. Installed SageTV and got the sever running (though the client apparently needed some other 3rd party add-ons to play video on the server - but I did not care, I just wanted the server for my multiple clients throughout the house. Now note that I have a MCE 500 card in the server with the extra head and I also have the HD PVR connected via USB - I was able to get all of them working. Now, for some reason, I was unable to play movies on the clients. Not a setting or anything - as soon as I selected Videos form any client, the entire system would freeze. I was never able to figure out what was going on (yes, I checked permissions, paths, shares, etc...). I was willing to work through this, but the last straw came that whenever I rebooted the system, the video devices would come up in a different order and I would have to re-configure them. I am sure there is a way to make these static in Linux - but I am done. I am moving everything back t windows as we speak.

Nothing against Linux - and I like a good project - but at some point, I actually want to watch TV as well as my movies.

Hope this helps some NOOB in this environment understand what they are getting into.

[stuckless]

I think i've said this several times, but I think that setting up a homebrew PVR is hard enough to do without having to learn how to troubleshoot a new OS at the same time. Even though I use linux on my computers every day, I'd never recommend anyone try to setup a PVR in linux unless they are really well skilled in linux.

For what's it worth... I had a very similar experience as yourself.... except on windows. I'm a linux person, and when I tried setting up stuff on windows, I don't know it well enough to troubleshoot why some videos play fine and others don't. I have no idea what people are talking about they start talking about directx filters and graphs. And I have a hell of time getting a dvd to play in windows.

Ironically, because I know linux quite well, and I spend my entire day in linux, all those things are quite common and easy to solve to me. But I can certainly appreciate your poor experience. I think that moving to windows was definately the right choice for you.

I don't think that linux is any more stable than a well configured windows machine. When I started to use the beta HD-PVR drivers, I had some lock ups... fortunately now, my system is quite stable, but I doubt it's any more stable than a windows machine that sits and does nothing all day except run sage and serve up files.

Good luck with the windows migration.

[mahcsm]

Thank you - great feed back. I think my take on Linux here is that it is great at isolating processes - meaning, that your server process itself (i.e. SageTV) is not any more stable, but if it fails, it will not bring down the whole system like Windows tends to do. I certainly do not eat and breath Linux as you do, though I am surprised that your skills in Linux do not transfer more easily into Windows than visa versa. Thaks for weighing in. I will say this, I love Sage and I am a long time customer - and I never have a problem purchasing anyhting from them (i.e. giving them money). I want them to be around for a long time.

Cheers,
Mike

[rz888951]

I actually was forced (because of the setup I wanted) to go with Linux. I first had the Windows version on XP which was as stable as one can get. I purchased the Linux version because I wanted to learn something new and played with it on a secondary machine. As it turns out it was a good thing I did this. My digital cards are not supported at all in the Windows version of Sage and also wanted to use multiple PVR150s, but only one blaster. Windows wouldn't allow this or I should say the Hauppauge blaster software wouldn't. Linux has no issues with my digital cards or a single blaster with multiple 150s on-board.

Having said all that, I feel your pain. If I didn't have time to play and figure all of my issues out before switching I most likely would have put my foot through the Linux server I use. The issues I uncovered were:

1. Unlike Windows, Linux doesn't save video card order unless you specify UDEV rules or other config options (looks like you hit that wall too)
2. EXT3 is SLOW at deleting recordings ( looks like the new version of Sage in beta will address this) so other more exotic file systems need to be used.
3. Java version shipped in Ubuntu 8.04 caused several corrupt Wiz.bin files. The Java version in 7.10 and whatever version I've since updated to don't have the problem. Windows and Java never gave me a moments problem.

[ntisdale]

That's interesting rz888951 - I have my Sage setup running well except every so often it will either crash (requiring a restart) or lock up (requiring a kill -9 pid before restarting). I'm running on Ubuntu 8.04 with sage 6.4 and I recently reinstalled the entire system (for various other reasons), since the re-install the crashes/lock-ups are far less frequent but still occasionally occur. I've not be able to get to the bottom of it but wondered whether it could have something to do with the version of Java I'm running. Which specific version of Java did you find the most stable?

Neil

[bcjenkins]

I found lockups consistent with Java 1.6 and moved to Java 1.5_16

B

[jreichen]

FYI I'm running Ubuntu 8.04, Sage 6.4.8, and Java

java version "1.6.0_06"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_06-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 10.0-b22, mixed mode, sharing)

That's the current Java from the Ubuntu repositories - sun-java6-jre 6-07-3ubuntu2. (I'm not sure why the versions don't match up better.)

It's been very stable except it will occasionally lock up when tuning an encrypted channel on the HDHR. I keep a few of those in the guide to see if there's anything good on that I want to watch on the Comcast DVR. Sometimes a favorite will pick up something on that channel and try to record it. I finally removed the encrypted channels and haven't seen a crash since then.

When SageTV crashes, Java creates a log file named hs_err_pidxxxxx.log in the SageTV home directory. I rename sagetv_0.txt to sagetv_0_pidxxxxx.log before restarting SageTV and then I have both the SageTV log and Java log for reporting to support.

[rrambo]

I have a similar story, but a bit different scenario. My sage server is running in a 8.04 server vm. I have been running linux placeshifter as my client under 8.04 and 8.10. For the most part, everything worked ok but I had a few problems. First of all, everything related to sage server runs perfectly. The only issue I have is some sort of memory leak that I have yet to pin down. It really doesn't cause any issues but I usually reboot the server side once a month.

My problems are with placeshifter. First, ever since ubuntu 7.10 I haven't been able to get my spdif out to work. I never had problems with spdif out with 7.04 but haven't been able to get it to work from 7.10 on. So I've been using regular analog audio out but after a move of my home theater center I developed an annoying interference hum. On top of that, with 3D enabled on the placeshifter client I would sometimes get annoying green lines at the top or bottom of the screen as well as some videos color would be completely fubar. But with 3D turned off, I would get the annoying menu overlay flip-flop. However, video playback was fine on all videos after the menu time-out and I had no color issues with 3D turned off.

So after much deliberation, I moved to XP for my placeshifter client. (I am NOT a windows person so I really didn't want to make this shift) Well, my spdif out now works so I have digital audio out, and I have no problems with menu overlay or video playback issues. So, all in all, I'm now in better shape running placeshifter under XP than I was with linux.

There are however issues, so it's not perfect by any means. The one thing that worked perfect under linux, my microsoft mce remote, now doesn't work so great under XP!!! It's quite ironic to me that microsoft's remote works better under linux than it does with XP.. All my buttons worked properly under linux, but under XP most of them don't work at all! It's usable, but nothing like how it worked in linux.. On top of that, sometimes it just stops working and I have to unplug the ir receiver and plug it back in to get it to work.. Never had that problem with linux either.

And now for the biggest surprise.. I got better HD playback with my setup using the linux placeshifter than I do with XP.. I really expected HD playback to be better with XP since it utilizes the gpu for processing.. but I could playback more HD content under linux. (just to clarify, this was all perfomed on the same hardware).

So, for now I'm continuing to use placeshifter under XP.. but if I could get spdif out and overlay issues corrected under linux I would switch back in a second.

[rz888951]

Here is the version my Ubuntu 8.04 reports back. I know I updated from the version shipped via synaptic from the standard repositories.

java version "1.6.0_07"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_07-b06)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 10.0-b23, mixed mode, sharing)