linux

For media consumption in my house, I use MythTV. One of the computers connected to a TV is an ECS Liva. For about $100 it is a decent little Myth frontend. Mine is connected to a TV over HDMI at 1920x1080.

For media consumption at home I use MythTV. Connected to my TVs are 3 small, low power computers. One is an older Atom with discrete Intel GPU. The other two are newer. One is an ECS Liva X (ECS Liva X). Great little system for about $100. The last device is an Intel NUC 5th gen Core i5 (Intel NUC5I5SYJ).

This is part two of my journey to get Linux running reliably on the Zotac PicoBox PI-320-W2. Please see part 1 for an overview of the hardware.Once the challenges presented by a 32-bit UEFI were overcome, I noticed Linux would not boot from a normal cold-boot, or warm boot. I would get to the Grub menu screen, but then the screen went blank and nothing seemed to happen after that. I could get Linux to boot if I opened the BIOS boot menu (hitting F8) and selected the correct entry for Grub.

This is part one of my journey to get Linux up and running reliably on a Zotac PicoBox PI-320-W2. I purchased the Zotac PicoBox PI-320-W2 mini-PC for use as a MythTV frontend. The device is cheap (open box on Amazon for under $150), Intel BayTrail powered, and should be powerful enough to support my needs.The PicoBox box came with Windows 8.1 (32-bit) w/Bing. This is the trimmed down version of Windows for devices with less memory and storage space. The PicoBox has 2 GB RAM and 32GB eMMC flash. The first challenge was getting Linux to boot.

I recently wanted to use PHP for a service running on a Linux machine. After looking at several projects I decided to dig deeper into phpdaemon. The source is available on GitHub (https://github.com/kakserpom/phpdaemon). There is some documentation in English and some in Russian. The English documentation is less than ideal. I fought with the code for some time before getting it installed and running. Here is what I did to get everything working under Ubuntu Linux 12.04.

We recently needed to upgrade the storage on our email server. To keep downtime to a minimum we decided to install the server on new hardware and transition everything over. In the past when we used maildir for mail storage this was easy. Simply pause the queue, rsync the mail, point SMTP ports to new server, unpause queue, rsync again. The upgrade this time is more complicated because we are using Zarafa. Zarafa is a great email server. There are open source, free, and commercially licensed version available.