The Assembly

As luck would have it, everything arrived on my wife's birthday. So, for better or worse, I spent most of the night putting the thing together. I got to experience a whole new world of trying to make things fit. It turns out I was lucky I went with the 2.5" drive; I'm not sure I could've squeezed a 3.5" drive in with the tuner card. One neat feature is that the case came with a CF-to-IDE module, so it would be possible to use a CF card as a hard drive, further reducing power consumption (assuming you could spin down the data drive when not in use). However, again, the tuner card was big enough that it blocked the pins where the IDE cable would connect to the CF adapter. Just as well; I don't have a CF card big enough from which to boot, anyway.

I had already downloaded the iMedia MythTV ISO and burned it to a CD. I took the box to the basement, where I had an extra monitor, hooked up a CD-ROM drive (full-size IDE drive, which of course didn't fit in the case -- fortunately, DVD playback was not a requirement) and ran through the installer. All in all, that procedure was fairly painless.

I then took the box upstairs, finished closing it, and hooked it up to the TV. Unfortunately, there was no display. I brought the extra monitor up from the basement and rebooted several times. Eventually, I found the option in the BIOS to direct video to the TV (buried under "AGP Timings" of all places). The monitor stayed nearby, though, just in case.

Unfortunately, not all was puppies and roses. Although the iMedia distribution included drivers for the LCD, it did not in fact have it hooked up to MythTV, so although the display showed me CPU usage, it didn't show anything having to do with the PVR, nor could I use the keypad to control the system. Can't pull the keyboard yet.

Another puzzler was that, once the system booted up and launched X, all terminal screens were garbage. It's like it set the text mode to some bizzare resolution or frequency, because I couldn't read anything. The monitor would also start in with a high-pitched whine. I decided to pull the plug on it for the night.