Day two

Got a keyboard and USB adapter. Plugged in and boot. Blank screen. Lovely.

Need to check boot order. F2 to launch BIOS  - no effect. Pulled out CMOS battery and boot.

We’re in. OK, hard drive detected, cd drive detected. Check boot order.  Floppy, CD, Hard disk. Good. Reboot. Problem with CD drive. Change BIOS to ignore and swap cd to other drive. Works.

Install Ubuntu. Loading screen.
SQUASHFS error: Unable to read page, block 15df9320

Google. Reboot and check disc. (This may take some time) - Errors found in 1 files Tried CD in different drive.

“Cannot operate in Low Graphics Mode” - Now I need to select my monitor.  Well its a TV, so I’ll just try a monitor at 800×600. OK. Blank screen.

Damn, Reboot.  Try again.  Different resolution.  Blank screen.

Damn. This isn’t looking good.So maybe the disk is bad. Heaven forgive me, I’ll install XP.
1 hour later and I’m downloading the first of 88 software patches, but I’m installed.  I guess the disk is fine.

Day 3
I think that my issue is running it through a TV for install.  Maybe the X11 engine can’t load properly.  So I’ll download the alternative CD without the LiveCD and do a text based install. CD is inserted and I boot.

Install in text mode please. And now my screen is flickering like crazy. Its trying to display the image but its not got the right frequency.  So I’m stuck.

I tried frantically hitting Enter in the hopes that an installation would eventually start up. Not so true.
Solution: Friday I’m going to my gf’s parents house to borrow their monitor so I can get Ubuntu installed and get the necessary drivers for my ATI Radeon 7000 card. Hopefully it will work when I come back here.

Today I picked up my box which will soon become my MythTV box. I decided to build a PVR for myself a few months back but just needed the supplies.

So far I have the TV tuner card, an Hauppage Win-TV PCI card, a graphic card, Radeon ATI AGP. I just needed the box. Well today I picked up a Dell Optiplex GX300 which will become the nervecenter of the whole operation.

I started by removing the old SCSI drives, and SCSI card from the motherboard. Then stuck in the Ubuntu CD and booted the system up. And what did I see? Keyboard error. So of course I need a keyboard to boot.  So I went round to borrow a keyboard from my gf’s dad. Just my luck, he only had a USB keyboard, and this PC doesn’t seem to play well with USB keyboards. So I need to get a USB to PS/2 adapter from work tomorrow. I might get a keyboard too just in case.

Hopefully tomorrow I can get ubuntu installed and MythTV setup. If not, then I might have to look at another base pc to build from.