Does anyone run a virtual machine under linhes? Which one do you recommend?

I love linhes, but I also like tinkering with the latest and greatest (mainly transcoding tools like x264, ffmpeg and the like). Rather than compile and install the latest packages on my linhes box it occured to me that installing a vanilla arch linux under a virtual machine would be a better way to go.

I run VirtualBox so that I can run an XP machine in order to do NetFlix streaming. I couldn't get VMware to run (something about the BKL, even though my kernel has BKL enabled). I'm not saying that VB is the best solution, but it works for me. Integrating the VM into the main menu has greatly increased the WAF (1 button press to NetFlix streaming)

-Shawn

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LH 7.00.02 (custom kernel K8 & PAE)| ASUS M4A89GTD PRO | AMD PhenomII 955 Black | 8GB Kingston DDR3 1600 | 2 x HDHR dual tuner | ASUS GT430 HDMI A/V out | 2 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB (sata) | ASUS DRW-24B3ST DVD-RW | GearHead KB3800TPW Kbd

Shawn,

What distro package do you use for LinHes?

Thanks

I guess that I don't understand the question. I started with the LH 7.00.02 .iso and made my modifications from there. LH 7.00.02 is based on Arch.

-Shawn

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LH 7.00.02 (custom kernel K8 & PAE)| ASUS M4A89GTD PRO | AMD PhenomII 955 Black | 8GB Kingston DDR3 1600 | 2 x HDHR dual tuner | ASUS GT430 HDMI A/V out | 2 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB (sata) | ASUS DRW-24B3ST DVD-RW | GearHead KB3800TPW Kbd

On the VirtualBox download page for linux is say:

Please choose the appropriate package for your Linux distribution

Was just wondering which one you to used.

Tim

I used the generic one - http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualb ... ux_x86.run

-Shawn

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LH 7.00.02 (custom kernel K8 & PAE)| ASUS M4A89GTD PRO | AMD PhenomII 955 Black | 8GB Kingston DDR3 1600 | 2 x HDHR dual tuner | ASUS GT430 HDMI A/V out | 2 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB (sata) | ASUS DRW-24B3ST DVD-RW | GearHead KB3800TPW Kbd

I've been running VMWare Server 2 under LinHES since KMR5F27 days. Works great. I'm currently at 6.03. It makes upgrades and tinkering absolutely risk free and simple.

Shawn, when you say you tried VMWare you didn't say which package. There are several deployments options.

Shortly I plan to migrate from VMWare Server 2 to vSphere 4.1 to gain the performance benefits of bare metal virtualization.

I prefer VMWare on my CentOS server after trying most of the others but I do use VirtualBox on my Win desktop too.

If you do a search in this forum, I'm certain you will have seen discussion on the topic before.

Christ,

I tried the player (VMware-Player-3.1.3-324285.i386.bundle), but couldn't get it to work. I was able to get VirtrualBox to run fairly painlessly. I have plenty of cpu/memory to run VB, so efficiency wasn't the highest priority. The only thing that took me a while was to get HDMI audio working. I wrote a script to tell VB about my audio configuration. I still haven't figured how to get ALSA:Default to work with my HDMI out, but I have been able to get audio out working with everything that I need right now. I may waste some more time on it if I need it later.

NetFlix.sh



I then fire this script from the mainmenu.xml



The XP machine automatically starts Firefox in full screen mode and logs into NetFlix. This gives a 1 button press access to NetFlix streaming from the main menu. The WAF is high due to this. We don't watch much TV, but do watch movies. LH is primarily a music/video jukebox for us.

Perhaps not the cleanest or the most efficient, but it works for me.

-Shawn

_________________
LH 7.00.02 (custom kernel K8 & PAE)| ASUS M4A89GTD PRO | AMD PhenomII 955 Black | 8GB Kingston DDR3 1600 | 2 x HDHR dual tuner | ASUS GT430 HDMI A/V out | 2 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB (sata) | ASUS DRW-24B3ST DVD-RW | GearHead KB3800TPW Kbd

Thanks guys.

I tried virtualbox, installed it, arch and had it running in around an hour. Great stuff.

Do you need a lot of extra horsepower to do this stuff? As opposed to what you need for Myth alone?

Yeah, the most compute intensive stuff I do is transcoding. Myth uses almost nothing by itself. We have a laptop and the mythbox, so the most powerful machine in our house happens to be the myth box, which also happens to be our only linux machine.

I wouldn't run a frontend virtualized but backend functions are fine. I run two HD-PVRs into master backend virtualized and two separate virtualized slave backend instances to do nothing but transcoding. I do this on a Core2 Quad core (Q6600).

To commercial detect an H.264 (HD-PVR) recording with maximum bitrate selected takes about the same amount of time as it took to record if that gives you an indication.