Can an Asus EEE PC run as a sage client or placeshifter?

[btrcp2000]

I know squat about linux, but I'm looking for a reliable wireless solution.

[exdirtfarmer]

You should be able to get the placeshifter up and running. There are walkthroughs to get the full desktop activated and there is a linux version of the placeshifter. If I had one I'd give it a go. Google is your friend.

[cclayton]

There are active forums and good info at http://www.eeeuser.com/.
I also have been watching this type of platform closely and am interested in running one as a place shifter. I just presumed that it would be doable with a full Linux platform (worst case, install your own Distro).

I will likely wait until summer to get something as the market settles a little bit. New models are coming fast a furious currently...

Cheers,
Corey

P.S. Man I need to update my sig. I upgraded to a new server a while ago!

[btrcp2000]

yes, i found eeeuser last night. google opens up a whole new world when you figure out to search for "eee pc" instead of "eeepc".

Now I'm wondering if it can handle h.264 stuff? I don't really care if it shows in HD (as I doubt it can anyhow without lots of skippage). I don;t have any h.264 right now, but supposedly the new hd analog encoder thing sage has coming reencodes to h.264. Will I be able to have stuff dumbed down to the eeepc's level of ability, like the mvps do if I am generatinglots of recordings in h.264 (again, don;t care whether it actually plays in hi-def on the eee pc, but lots of things are actually recordings of hi def broadcasts).

[Khristopher]

I don't use my Sage server with HD so I can't try that, but otherwise the Eee PC works incredible with the Placeshifter!!

[baudfather]

Khristopher - are you running the default Xandros?

[Thomas Wischgol]

I get to the standard UI myself. However, it will not play videos. When I try start one, I just get a black screen because the mplayer crashes. When I try to play a video file with the mplayer verion supplied by Sage it crashes as well with the message below. I am using the stock Xandros with the libflaac library installed to get Sage's mplayer to work. I have no clue why this is happening. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Thomas


MPlayer dev-SVN-rUNKNOWN-4.1.1 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz (Family: 6, Model: 13, Stepping: 6)
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.

Playing /media/PDU01-1G 7BH2.0/partition1/CEG790/fire_buisofr.mpg.
DEBUG - active_file=0 circFileSize=0
MPEG-ES file format detected.


MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: video_read_properties
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.

[Thomas Wischgol]

I just installed the current release candidate 6.3.9 and it seems to fix the problem. Now I only need to find out which font the UI uses to solve the problem with the last letter being clipped off.

Thomas

Originally Posted by Thomas Wischgol

I get to the standard UI myself. However, it will not play videos. When I try start one, I just get a black screen because the mplayer crashes. When I try to play a video file with the mplayer verion supplied by Sage it crashes as well with the message below. I am using the stock Xandros with the libflaac library installed to get Sage's mplayer to work. I have no clue why this is happening. Any ideas?

[DisturbedKT]

I solved this problem of the fonts being clipped off, so thought I'd share.

The problem is that the Placeshifter is assuming the presence of the Core MS truetype fonts common on all Windows boxes. The fastest way I found to fix it for the eee is to use a script from the suse folks which pulls down and installs these, and do light hackery to allow it to run.

First, the script we'll use requires the cabextract package. This exists in either the xandros or debian etch repositories... For reference here is my /etc/apt/sources.list:

---Begin snippit---
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p700/ p700 main
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p700/en/ p700 main

#deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/eeepcrepos/ p701 main

# Xandros repos
deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free
deb http://dccamirror.xandros.com/dccri/ dccri-3.0 main
deb http://www.geekconnection.org/ xandros4 main

# Debian repos
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
---End snippit---

Once you've added debian/xandros repositories, don't forget to do a "aptitude update", then do "aptitude install cabextract" to get that library you need.

Second, get the fetchmsttfonts.sh file from here: http://download.opensuse.org/update/...chmsttfonts.sh

Download this to your eee pc, then open it up in an editor and find the section about 40-ish lines down that looks like this:

---Begin snippit---
. /etc/sysconfig/proxy

if test "$PROXY_ENABLED" != "no"; then
if test -n "$HTTP_PROXY" ; then
export http_proxy="$HTTP_PROXY"
fi
fi

if [ -z $http_proxy ]; then
echo
echo "note: No proxy is used. Please set the environment variable \"http_proxy\""
echo "note: to your favorite proxy, if you want to use a proxy for the download."
echo "note:"
echo "note: bash: export http_proxy=\"http://proxy.example.com:3128/\""
echo "note: tcsh: setenv http_proxy \"http://proxy.example.com:3128/\""
fi
---End snippit---

This entire section is suse-specific and borks on the eee, so you can remove these lines and save the script.

Run the script from the command line by typing "sh fetchmsttfonts.sh"


Let this download and install your fonts, it'll also try to run another suse-specific script, font-config, which will fail. Thankfully it's not important on the eee, if you run the placeshifter now, font issue is all gone....




The only outstanding issue I'm aware of is the video overlay/OSD issue when trying to watch video. The eee won't start a placeshifter session with 3d acceleration enabled, and without the setting, the integrated video doesn't look to support native overlay properly. If anyone has solved this last bit of the puzzle, I think we'll hav eall the known issues squared away....

[Thomas Wischgol]

DisturbedKT,

Great, thank you very much for this nice summary. It worked like a charm. I only had to install curl first as well. Now it finds the correct font. I also see the overlay issue. But that at least stops once it only shows the video.

Thomas

[schill]

Originally Posted by Thomas Wischgol

I just installed the current release candidate 6.3.9 and it seems to fix the problem. Now I only need to find out which font the UI uses to solve the problem with the last letter being clipped off.

Thomas

Did you handle this on the server side or on the placeshifter side?

I've got placeshifter installed on my EEE PC, but I'm getting the playback errors.

[Thomas Wischgol]

Originally Posted by schill

Did you handle this on the server side or on the placeshifter side?

I've got placeshifter installed on my EEE PC, but I'm getting the playback errors.

I installed the fonts as previously described on the Eee PC. I did not change anything on the server.

[schill]

Originally Posted by Thomas Wischgol

I installed the fonts as previously described on the Eee PC. I did not change anything on the server.

Thanks. Sorry I wasn't clear, but my problem is with mplayer. I haven't worried about the fonts yet (although I've seen the problem).

What's the fix for not being able to play anything?

Thanks

[Thomas Wischgol]

Originally Posted by schill

Thanks. Sorry I wasn't clear, but my problem is with mplayer. I haven't worried about the fonts yet (although I've seen the problem).

What's the fix for not being able to play anything?

Thanks

Sorry, I guess I did not get that. The version 6.3.5 did not work for me (as it seems it is not working for you). I used a newer beta version 6.3.9 which worked fine and right out of the box. 6.3.10 is out now as well which I have not tried on the Eee PC yet. You may have to install a few things on the Eee PC to cover all the dependencies. Type in "ldd mplayer" within the Sage directory on the Eee PC to see if there are any libraries missing.

Thomas

[schill]

Thanks for the "ldd mplayer".

I'm missing libfaac. I'll get that and see what happens.

[schill]

OK, I give up.

Any ideas about how I can find libfaac?

Thanks

[Thomas Wischgol]

Originally Posted by schill

OK, I give up.

Any ideas about how I can find libfaac?

Thanks

You will have to add a few feeds in order to install other debian packages as well. You can follow the directions on this link: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/addingxandrosrepos

Then synaptic should find it if you have it search for libfaac.

Thomas

[schill]

Thanks, again.

I've checked using synaptic (following the approach outlined in the link) before but couldn't find libfaac. I did find a faac package but was hesitant to install it.

I've got to admit that I find the whole "trust what you find from some repository" thing a bit difficult to handle sometimes.

But, thanks for confirming that that is the right approach. I'll dig some more and see if I can find a problem with what I was doing.

[nickjp]

Hi, did you eventually find libfaac?
If so, can you give me a hint, I am still searching........

[schill]

I don't remember now if I ever got it to work.

I ended up getting a new machine (901) and I put Windows on it. I didn't really want to do that, but there were several things I needed/wanted that aren't available under Linux (or weren't before). It's working fine under Windows.

If I get a chance (things are busy), I'll check the state of my 701.