My Debian Stuff

Posted by stephen on Friday, 12th August, 2005 @ 16:13

Hmm, I'm not posting often enough here at the moment, and sorry to anyone who's not a geek, but it's going to have to be a geeky post this time.

I'm currently setting up some servers at work to stream digital TV from DVB-T and DVB-S cards over our network, giving our users Freeview and various free-to-air satellite channels without the need for any extra equipment.

We've been running this for a while, but it's all set up rather messily. So as part of our documented rebuild I've zapped our DVB servers with Debian sarge and am in the process of building proper packages to make deploying all 6 servers easier and to make my life easier in future too.

Unfortunately a little while ago Hauppauge changed from a Philips chipset on their DVB-T budget cards to a Conexant one that isn't supported in the stock Debian 2.6 kernel.

So my first task has been to build the latest kernel, 2.6.12. And I've been pleasantly surprised how easy it was to make a Debian kernel package. So I now have my very first package. I've even set up a repository for it.

No doubt this is only of use to me, but hey, who knows. The kernels you'll find here are built for P4 and K7. They're built on the options used by Debian in 2.6.8. There have been some extra options since then and I've answered all of these as the suggested defaults. I've removed DRM as it didn't compile!

You can get 'em by adding this to your sources.list:

deb http://packages.neuron1.com/ stable main

My next pleasant surprise was that sarge automatically matched up the new drivers available with the hardware installed in the server and initialised everything automatically. No more hideous scripts to load third party modules as we used to have on our SuSE setup!

My next problem was that the VLC in sarge, though very recent, seg faults when attempting to stream from our TV cards. Bummer. We've had so many problems with VLC lately. I've compiled the latest version and it works, but I'm going to see if it has the same memory leak we've been getting on the other system.

If it does, I'm going to try the now unsupported VLS that is packaged in Debian and see how stable that is.

If it works fine, then more fun, creating a Debian package from the latest VLC. If I do, you'll find it in my repository!

Either way I'm going to need to build a package that contains our configuration system for what channels to stream, along with a script to stop the multicasts flooding the network.