Chris Matchett

If you haven’t been put off by the title of this blog entry you probably have some of the gear mentioned and are desperately looking for help. I am not going to give a detailed account of how I got freevo up and running on my Fedora box (with a remote control), I’m just going to give you the broad strokes….

• I used Fedora 4 with the source code of a vanilla 2.6.16 kernel available in /usr/src. I’m running the standard 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 kernel, the vanilla source is only to help the lirc build.
• I installed lirc from source, not the FC4 rpm, using the lirc_it87 module. The it87 module will get the built-in infrared receiver working on your iDeq (you’ll see the receivers details in the Bios uder Super I/O i.e. CIR).
• I bought a nVidia Geforce 4 MX440 on eBay for £10 and connected the s-video connector to a scart socket available in Tesco’s for £3.50 (you need the In/Out switch).
• Ooops! I followed some popular instructions online on how to get the nVidia card working by installing nvidia-glx with yum….lirc stopped working…the yum update upgraded the kernel and killed my working lirc.
• I went back to the FC4 out of the box kernel, 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4, and downloaded the nVidia driver from the nVidia website and this worked a treat. No need for nvidia-glx via yum (btw there’s a copy of my tv-out xorg.conf kicking around my blog somewhere)…
• I installed freevo by following the instructions from their wiki and as they say ‘Bob’s your Uncle!’

So there you have it, what took me a month summarized in twelve lines!