EZ_Daton Everon
01-01-04, 03:58 PM
A little background:
I just got through doing a complete upgrade of computers for a local company, part of my fee was taking the old systems. The only one really worthwhile was a dual P2 350 with 256 MBs PC133 RAM, with 2 9GB SCSI-2 Drives.
After playing with a NWN server on it, and moving the NWN Server to a 2.4GHz machine, I was stuck as for what to use it for.
I downloaded Freevo (www.freevo.org) and installed it. A bit of trouble insued, as the Video Card in it is a S3 Virge GX2, and getting the TV out working meant not using a monitor and just having the RCA cable out plugged up.
This was great and allowed me to use mplayer from the commandline to play movies. But getting X working with it was another story. The big break was in changing the driver in XF86Config to "vesa" for the card. This made me able to run X in 640x480x24M.
After that I ran Freevo just fine. So I added a user to the machine named freevo, set it's password to Freevo and changed the gdm.conf to login Freevo automatically on boot.
Next step was to get rid of the Window manager, and just use regular X. So I created /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/Freevo and added this line:
exec /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession Freevo
chmod 755 Freevo
Then I added this to /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession underneath the same type thing for kde.
Freevo)
exec -l $SHELL -c "/usr/local/freevo/freevo"
;;
After these mods, Freevo user logs in automatically, runs the Freevo app instead of a window manager, and when it exits, returns to the login screen.
Ok, long explination, but here's the juicy tidbits.
Freevo is awesome, I can play all my videos, (Divx, Quicktime .mov, .wmv, etc.), play any of my mp3 collection (which I didn't have, but am ripping all my CD's now), ogg vorbis, and even allows me to run MAME. All to my TV and out through my sound system.
Thumbs up on this app, turning an old PC, into a workhouse of a multi-media center. Now to find some good nintendo like gamepads for the MAME stuff.
I know there is more I can do, but I don't have a TV Capture card so I stopped at this.
Point of this is I saw a thread of someone asking how to do this, and after my personal experience, this is the way to go.
----------------
Just remember: when you go to court, you are trusting your fate to
twelve people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty!
I just got through doing a complete upgrade of computers for a local company, part of my fee was taking the old systems. The only one really worthwhile was a dual P2 350 with 256 MBs PC133 RAM, with 2 9GB SCSI-2 Drives.
After playing with a NWN server on it, and moving the NWN Server to a 2.4GHz machine, I was stuck as for what to use it for.
I downloaded Freevo (www.freevo.org) and installed it. A bit of trouble insued, as the Video Card in it is a S3 Virge GX2, and getting the TV out working meant not using a monitor and just having the RCA cable out plugged up.
This was great and allowed me to use mplayer from the commandline to play movies. But getting X working with it was another story. The big break was in changing the driver in XF86Config to "vesa" for the card. This made me able to run X in 640x480x24M.
After that I ran Freevo just fine. So I added a user to the machine named freevo, set it's password to Freevo and changed the gdm.conf to login Freevo automatically on boot.
Next step was to get rid of the Window manager, and just use regular X. So I created /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/Freevo and added this line:
exec /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession Freevo
chmod 755 Freevo
Then I added this to /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession underneath the same type thing for kde.
Freevo)
exec -l $SHELL -c "/usr/local/freevo/freevo"
;;
After these mods, Freevo user logs in automatically, runs the Freevo app instead of a window manager, and when it exits, returns to the login screen.
Ok, long explination, but here's the juicy tidbits.
Freevo is awesome, I can play all my videos, (Divx, Quicktime .mov, .wmv, etc.), play any of my mp3 collection (which I didn't have, but am ripping all my CD's now), ogg vorbis, and even allows me to run MAME. All to my TV and out through my sound system.
Thumbs up on this app, turning an old PC, into a workhouse of a multi-media center. Now to find some good nintendo like gamepads for the MAME stuff.
I know there is more I can do, but I don't have a TV Capture card so I stopped at this.
Point of this is I saw a thread of someone asking how to do this, and after my personal experience, this is the way to go.
----------------
Just remember: when you go to court, you are trusting your fate to
twelve people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty!