Modeline magic
Recently I decided to put my old, otherwise unused, workstation to good use, by reinventing it as a mediacenter. The idea would be to install some sort of Linux on the old hardware, before going out buying something new (just to see if it would be worth it). This is however, where trouble began. Not only am I getting old an lazy – especially since my move to OS X, where everything just seems to magically work – but it turns out that mixing Xorg and HDTVs isn’t really something you would want to do in anything else but theory.
Moreover, it turns out that (almost) no references to my Samsung LE-32N71B HDTV (720p) exist on Google, and therefor it must not exist – but I quite like watching it anyway.
Even less information is available on how to make it work properly in Linux. Having spent quite some time in the jungle of Nvidias proprietary drivers and compilation of kernel modules, I entered the real hell of Modelines and over/under scan which comes with the “non-standard” resolutions which is HDTV.
After a lot of reading, configuring, reconfiguring and some more reading, I finally ended up with a working modeline for my Samsung LE32N71B tv – that is, it works for me. It seems that Modelines are just as personal as ones underwear, but this one fits my configuration:
Modeline "1360x768" 84.750 1360 1448 1565 1776 768 771 776 798 -hsync +vsync
Feel free to use it. It works fine with my old GeForce FX 5700LE and Kubuntu.
also i added the following, to the same “Monitor” section of my xorg.conf
HorizSync 29.0 - 75.0
VertRefresh 0.0 - 61.0
February 17th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Mode lines hell
I remember that from when running Linux on my MacBook before the drivers got patched. This is of course not a fault on Linux’s side but is due to bad Linux support from the hardware manufacturers. I think what really scares companies is the fact that supporting their products on Linux platforms means that they will have to support Linux in general, since they no doubt will get a lot of brain dead questions regarding something the customer think is company’s problem, when in fact the customer just got to learn how to use Linux.
And also, everything doesn’t just work in OS X
try playing around will weird programing languages and other stuff in OS X and you will find yourself have to compile it all manually and find all the dependencies yourself and compile them as well. And the newest versions are never available in the third party package managers. Also, this will clutter your system with files everywhere (don’t you just love that “Enter your admin password” box? It means files are being but places they shouldn’t) and you end up like you did with Windows, namely having to reinstall your system once every half year, simply because that is easier than cleaning up the mess your applications made. But except for that, yea, OS X is a joy. When stuff is built for OS X it runs smoothly and painlessly, and this is no doubt why graphics designers, sound people, and other media folks love it. All the applications they use are available for OS X and they run faster and better than in Windows.
Wow, look at me ranting and raving
You didn’t tell the good stuff in your post. What media center distro did you end up using? And did it live up to your expectations? 
February 17th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Still working on that last part, and I will get back to you. But I expect MythTv should do the trick.