ASUS DigiMatrix, MythTV and Gentoo

Updated 02/08/2006, 1347GMT

The ASUS Digimatrix is a very small, quiet unit that is supplied as a barebone system (approx. GBP 240.00). You must then add a Hard Disk, RAM and CPU.
(I find a Celeron 2.4GHz, 1GB PC2700 DDR, and a 200GB IBM drive fine)

After much work, late nights, beer and coding, (not to mention neglecting my other half!) I can report the successful running of mythtv with two tuners.
Edit: I am now running three tuners - two USB DVB ones + the internal Analogue one.

MANY thanks to my mate Jon, who has helped me a lot with this (moral support, recovery of lost partition tables, coding etc!)

By far the best forum that I have used so far is:
http://www.outertrack.com/digimatrix/viewforum.php?f=1
There is a great group of people on there willing to help out :)

Unfortunately, this seems to be down now :(

Alternative
A large amount of the work has gone into the www.geexbox.org project.
A complete re-write of my setpanel utility has been done (search for digitools within the geexbox source distribution).
Development has continued in my lazy absence and advanced to add support for features such as power on via remote.
Credit to Andrew Calkin and Ben Potter for continuing the development, and moving to geexbox :).

Some of their websites:
http://digiwiki.thesniderpad.com/
http://linux.yes.nu/
http://www.geexbox.org/

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Tuners:

saa7134 analogue TV (included)
USB WinTV Nova-USB (DVB)
USB TwinHan Vision Plus (DVB)

When viewing live TV from the digital USB receiver, cpu usage is mythfrontend = 25%, mythbackend = <1%.
When viewing live analogue TV (RTJpeg, Quality = 170) mythfrontend = 15%, mythbackend = 30%

Here is a list of the included hardware, and it's current state in my system under Linux (Now: 2.6.10-gentoo-r6)

Component	Current Status	Downloads
Kernel 2.6.7, 2.6.10, 2.6.12, 2.6.14	Working gentoo-dev-sources	kernel-2.6.7-config kernel-2.6.10-gentoo-r6-config
BootSplash	Working	kernel-2.6.7-config kernel-2.6.10-gentoo-r6-config grub.conf
Hardware sensors support (lm_sensors)	Working (it87 module, on ISA bus)	http://secure.netroedge.com/~lm78
Variable Speed Fan Control	Working At 100% CPU usage, the fan speed is mostly <85%, and the temperature between 44-46 Deg C. In idle, the fans are almost inaudiable, at 49%, 35 Deg C.	asusfan.html asusfan to put in /etc/init.d/
Consumer Infra Red (CIR) Remote Control This is the one on the front panel. It is known to work with the early DMs, not sure about later ones.	Working (modified lirc_it87 module, on ISA bus) (Hopefully) added to the Lirc 0.7.2 release? Thanks to Khyron for this! See: http://www.outertrack.com/digimatrix/viewtopic.php?t=295	lirc_it87.tar.gz My digimatrix.conf (renamed lircd.conf) My lircrc The lirc-0.7.0pre7.tar.bz2 Tarball
DVD / CDRW	Working (cdrecord + hdb=scsi)
TV Input Card (PAL, UK)	Working (saa7134 included in 2.6.8) Note: for sound to work, you need to un-mute the card before using it in mythtv! (xawtv does it automatically) v4lctl volume mute off You may use either the /dev/dsp1 or /dev/dsp as the input. (If you use /dev/dsp, make sure you select the correct recording input!) Contrary to many posts – full duplex seems to work fine for me.	saa7134 I have this statically linked in the Kernel now. Configuration params are in grub.conf
Accelerated X (xv) support My XF86Config-4 NEW: Now used in Dual head (mythtv on TV, xfce4 on Monitor / VGA) Dual Head config: XF86Config-4.dualhead	Working (very latest sis_drv.o) Note: you CAN use the composite output – connect the blue HDTV connector to the composite input on your TV (if it doesn't have S-VIDEO). When you reboot, it will notice that it can see 75ohms on only the one connector.	http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsisvga.shtml I used: http://www.winischhofer.net/sis/sis_drv.o_4.3.0_gcc3_200804-1.tar.gz
Audio Card	Working (intel8x0 alsa driver)	My alsactl restore file (sets the volumes, inputs etc): asound.state
USB	Working You need to install ehci_hcd, ohci_hcd and uhci_hcd for all of the ports to work.
Smart Card Reader	Working I used subfs to mount the card automatically if the mount point was accessed. (emerge -pv subfs)	My fstab
10/100Mb/s - SIS900 Based	Working (sis900 module in 2.6.8)
802.11b Wireless LAN	Working with the rt2400 drivers. I use rt2400_load To Load it.	http://rt2400.sourceforge.net/ rt2400_load /etc/init.d/net.ra0 /etc/conf/net
1Gb/s - 3C940 Based	Aparently working – I don't use it.	(3Com, module is 3c940 / 3c2000 from asus) Kernel 2.6 also contains a driver - "Marvell Yukon Chipset / SysKonnect SK-98xx Support" in 1000 MBit section
Asus Panel / OZ263 / LED Display	Working :D The apanel code was too far removed from this new chip. So I reverse engineered the commands going accross the I2C bus. (Thanks too to Ben, AKA bpuk, for hacking with me :) setpanel allows you to write digits to the display, turn on and off the AM / FM radio and monitor the volume control. I have also added (the requested) option to update the display with out resetting to -- --:-- first (-D option) 0.7 has been tidied up by Khyron (Andrew Calkin), he has also added auto detection for the correct I2C bus - this is excellent!	Based on the i2cset.c included with lm_sensors, I have created: setpanel.tar.gz setpanel-0.2.tar.gz setpanel-0.3.tar.gz setpanel-0.4.tar.gz setpanel-0.5.tar.gz setpanel-0.6.tar.gz setpanel-0.7.tar.gz audio_dj_i2c_log.tar.gz
FM Tuner	Working The setpanel code (>= 0.5) lets you turn the radio on and off, tune it, and store prog channels. Volume is controlled via the mixer.
Volume Knob	Working If you use "setpanel -D "000000" -l -T" it will display the current temperature and time (with flashing dots) Then when you adjust the volume control, not only will it display the current volume, it adjusts it too! After about 3 seconds, it will return back to the temp / time display.	setpanel (>= 0.6)

System Configuration

Here are some config files / system info that people have asked for:

Start up Scripts

In order for everything to run smoothly, I have added a few little changes to the the startup scripts:

Start my asusfan program in the background (keeps things cool + quiet)
Start up mythbackend
Run “alsactl restore”
Run mythfrontend
edit the mythbackend init.d script to restart if if it segfaults
start mythfrontend in a while(1) loop, so I can kill it with the remote (to restart if it dies)
This is done with irexec, and the command “killall -9 mythfrontend” :)

The information on this page is correct, and accurate to my knowledge. Please use the information at your own risk – if YOU break it, YOU are responsible!

Please send any corrections / info / etc to r_tay@hotmail.com or post on the http://outertrack.com/digimatrix/ forum.