You’re probably wondering why I’d use an E5200 when it doesn’t have hardware virtualisation features built in? Well, the server consumes very little juice compared to the Pentium 4 (26% less in fact), it’s more powerful, it’s cheap, cheerful, produces less ambient heat, is a heck of a lot quieter and there’s loads of CPU time left over to do other things outside of the VM on the host side.

CPU wise, when the server gets really busy I’ve seen spikes as high as 50%, but it never exceeds that, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s fine. If I ever need this box to do anything more significant, I’ll upgrade the CPU to something that does have VT-x later on.

If you see anything unusual/missing/dead from today onwards, please let me know in a comment!

But the power’s back now, and meantime I’ve gone and bought a shiny new UPS to keep the server running should there be any future power issues. Sorry the inconvenience, folks!

Tomorrow morning at 10:31 and 30 seconds, eastern Australians (except Queensland who will get it at 09:31 and 30 seconds) will experience 1234567890 Unix time. Where will you be on this momentous occasion?

If you’d like to check your own local time, simply drop into a terminal and paste this line of perl in:

$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'
Sat Feb 14 10:31:30 2009
$

After that, we only have the 32-bit Unix Millennium Bug to look forward to in 2038!

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Normally I wouldn’t endorse an Alpha to anyone but cutting-edge users, but I have to make an exception here. I’m going to keep using it until I come across a major show-stopper such as Firefox lockups or what-not.

If you’d like to try out the 64-bit plugin for yourself, here’s what you have to do.

First up, you need to be running Ubuntu 64-bit (duh), or any other 64-bit distro, but I’ll concentrate on Ubuntu here. This applies equally to Intrepid and Hardy installations, and should work for earlier ones too.

If you have the 32-bit wrapper and plugin installed, they need to be removed first. You can do that by jumping into a terminal and type:

$ sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree nspluginwrapper

Once that has finished, trot on over to Adobe’s Flash Player 10 site and download the 64-bit library (it’s not a proper .deb installer yet, just an archive). The link is at the bottom of the page. If you can’t see it, then click here for a direct link to the download.

Once it’s downloaded, extract the archive out. It contains only one file.

$ tar -xvf libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
libflashplayer.so
$

…and now move it to the Mozilla plugins directory for Firefox to pick up:

$ sudo mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

That’s it! Now quit and restart Firefox. Go to about:plugins to verify that Firefox has indeed added the Flash Player 10 plugin, and then go and visit any website containing Flash content.

Enjoy!

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Anyway, it’s all good – back on the air. Sorry about that folks!

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In my mind I had more questions – would Myth work well over a wireless LAN? Would it handle HDTV given it wouldn’t have the overhead of processing it from a tuner?

So I did some tests. I grabbed my EeePC 701 with Ubuntu Hardy and the Array.org custom kernel, installed the MythTV Frontend from the repository and tried it out. I have to say I was impressed with the completely unexpected results.

Loading the front end and bringing up live TV was a little slower than on my quad-core desktop, but SD live TV ran smoothly and fluidly, and changing channels was reasonably quick too, but still slower than my quad-core. HD, unfortunately didn’t run so well. Unlike when tuning directly where you get only 1 frame per second, this time I got bursts of about 1-2 seconds of fluid playback before it paused and played again for 1-2 seconds, paused and played again. Clearly the little Celeron ain’t beefy enough to deal with it.

But I was doing this over wireless – perhaps the WLAN didn’t have enough bandwidth to handle HD? I shutdown wireless and hooked up a piece of ethernet. Same story, unfortunately. The EeePC 701 cannot do HD. Unfortunate, really, since nearly all my recordings are in HD! Never mind, it’s still useful for watching random live TV in bed on the sidetable!

I recorded a video demonstrating the MythTV Frontend on the Eee which you can view it here.

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I don’t intend to be the Next Big Thing (TM) but I do intend to write up various things, opinions, mini-reviews of stuff and collate my Ubuntu Linux experiences and How-To guides in here.

Please enjoy your time here and leave comment if you feel like it!

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