funbox htpc

Funbox - Media Center

Funbox is my project to complete a homegrown media center in linux. After researching various projects such as Elisa, XBMC, etc... I have found that the best option is actually the most compact, yet complex. Here we go, this adventure is going to suck.

Hardware

MadWifi - Wifi Gone Mad

The Netgear W311T PCI wireless adapter comes with an Atheros chipset. This was supported in linux, but not native to Slackware 12. I'd always heard that wireless was a pain-in-the-ass to setup so I had been apprehensive. It turns out my fears were correct. Secure wireless capabilities for the do-it-yourself linux newbie is full of lack of documentation, old documentation, ubuntu, and lots of google searches of unanswered mailing lists and forum posts. At the Corporate apartment we're using an Apple Airport Extreme configured with WPA2 – A word of warning – Do not trust Apple's WEP-fake implementation, it is not correct and reports as WPA anyway.

MadWifi drivers are not so straight forward to compile. For some reason even though I passed the KERNEL_PATH variable to make it was hard to compile drivers for a different kernel version. This is frustrating. Okay, so we have our drivers, and all we have to do is

modprobe ath_pci

And that should load up all the related modules as well.

WPA2 is handled by a utility called "wpa_supplicant", which has some of the most unintelligble debug (some of which is MadWifi's fault too).

X.org

How to get dri2proto?
X.org repository. I was trying to git pull everything from january, and I couldn't find dri2proto or how to get it for the life of me. It's not on X.org's wiki at either the DRI2 or Modular Developer's Guide. Instead I found an obscure Sourceforge Mail Archive Post. Update: Somehow it's showing up on google now.

i965 and video tearing
The next step in a htpc is of course making sure you can play video in mplayer including the latest h.264 720p and 1024p content. I'm not into Blu-Ray or HD-DVD (fuck drm seriously). So this box will just be for matroska encapsulated video. More on i965 drivers and video tearing and xv overlay support.