Replies

I come from a long (25 years+) DOS/Windows background. I had very little *nix experience until I tried Ubuntu a few years ago.

The geek in me loves it. And I do use it as a server OS — my home media server, DNS servers, DHCP servers, web server, mail server, etc. all use Ubuntu. And I’ve tried several times to use it as my primary OS on my desktop or laptop, but sooner or later I find something that just isn’t available, and that always pushes me back to Windows.

I’ve got a couple of HTPCs and I’d love to use MythBuntu or the like, but there’s no Blu-Ray support (yes, I know I can decrypt/rip a disc to the hard drive and play it that way, but I don’t want to do that). I do a lot of video encoding/etc. and am dependent on the various Windows-based tools like Avisynth and MeGUI; I find them to be a lot better than futzing around with mencoder or ffmpeg on Linux. Also, I do play games occasionally, and didn’t care for the Cedega-type solution.

When I can do things like that on Linux, I’ll move in a flash.

I also don’t bother with Linux for the various family members I support for similar reasons. My wife and daughter and mother all use Photoshop, and yes I know all about The Gimp, but it’s not a seamless transition…and there’s plugin support to consider. My father is probably the only one whose needs are simple enough, but he’s used Windows for a long time and the transition would be painful.

I really, really want to move to Linux and open-source apps. As soon as I can…I will.

–chris

Another vote for wiring CAT6.

WiFi is OK, but as soon as you start trying to move large files around or doing video, you’ll want wired. Your TV service may, someday, use (or make use of) Ethernet as well. Like a poster above, I have U-Verse and having Ethernet at my various TV spots made installation a breeze.

In fact, if I were doing it all over again, I’d pull way more wire because pulling the wire is the biggest problem. When I re-wire I’m going to pull no less than four CAT6 runs to each place I intend to put a jack. I’ll leave the unused runs in the wall for now, but this will make it far more likely that I don’t run short later. (When I pulled a single Ethernet to my TV I figured that’d be enough, but now I have a U-Verse DVR, an HTPC, and sometimes an X-Box 360…and I will add a Blu-Ray player soon. Ports go fast.)

But I’m a networking geek, so maybe you shouldn’t go by me.

–chris

HTPCs don’t really require much ‘power’ in normal operation. You say it’s a roomy case and you’ve added extra fans. So it seems to me that the problem is the AV cabinet has insufficient ventilation letting the heat build up inside. It matters little if you change the HTPC case or add more fans because heat is still going to build up in the AV cabinet – even with 10 fans fitted. Have you got other electronics creating heat in the cabinet such as a powerful AV Receiver, satellite receiver, etc?

I suggest that you experiment first to prove if there is a cooling problem with the PC by temporarily setting up the HTPC outside the AV cabinet and see if it still suffers overheating. (Use one of the stress test utilities to run it maxed out.) If it doesn’t overheat, then you need to tackle the cabinet problem.

You say leaving the cabinet door opens stops the overheating: that almost proves the HTPC is not at fault. So take a look at the cabinet. If it is a wooden construction, maybe you can fit a couple of fans to the cabinet. They make 160mm PC cooling fans that push around a lot of air at relatively slow, speeds quietly. Perhaps you could fit one at the bottom sucking cold air into the cabinet and another near the top rear sucking out hot air. You can run the fans from your HTPC because you only really need them running when the HTPC is switched on.

Yeah, this is what I was kind of afraid of. No, the PC can run all day just fine out of the cabinet — or even in the cabinet if I leave the door open.

It’s not wood; it’s cheap particle-board thingy. Front doors are glass; top, bottom and sides are 1/4″ or 1/2″ particle board, and the back is very thin paperboard (or whatever that is that they use on cheap cabinets for the back). The cabinet has a left and right compartment, and each compartment has a shelf in the middle. The right side has my A/V receiver and a small Cisco DVR/receiver; the left side has the HTPC and a (powered-off) Laserdisc player. PC is on the bottom, with a couple of inches on each side and 3-or-4 inches above free (and it’s on rubber feet). There’s no real flow between the two sides; not even a cutout for wires (wires go out the back of one side and then in through a cutout in the back to the other).

I may try just removing the back altogether. It won’t have as clean a look, and I still face the wires-are-visible issue (an important part of the WAF, believe me), but there may be no other alternative.

Thanks for the tips!

–chris

That’s some potent hardware for such a small case you have there. With the addition of a video card, an open chasis might not cut it anymore.

I’d go with option 2 personally. I’ve used this case before as an example, and it is fantastic. Although a bit pricey and you don’t necessarily have to have the handle, there are models that come without it.

Other options would include modifying the cabinet with an open mesh like structure, and or replacing the processor’s heatsink
& fan.

Not a bad suggestion, although my current A/V cabinet won’t accommodate an upright case. But it’s worth considering.

–chris

A couple more thoughts:

[*]Technically you don’t need the “if exist” part; you could just start from the word path (since you know it’s there).
[*]For that matter, you could just add the directory to your permanent path and remove all of the “if exist” statements if you’re comfortable with that. I suppose there’s a very small possibility that this could break another Java-based program that comes with its own javaw.exe, but such programs should find their own javaw.exe before the one in the path anyway, so it’s pretty unlikely.

–chris

This is a great article! One tip I have:

If you’re trying to get Unshake to work but finding it won’t launch properly, you may have to edit the launch.bat file. This batch file is hard-coded for the path of javaw.exe; it tries several different “well-known” spots, but none were correct on my Win7 x64 laptop.

First, find javaw.exe. Windows’ built-in search is great for this. You may find multiple copies; I recommend looking for the one that is part of the JRE (Java Runtime Environment).

Second, edit launch.bat with any text editor or Notepad. You will see a number of “if exist” lines like this:

Code:

if exist "c:jdk1.2.2jrebinjavaw.exe" path "c:jdk1.2.2jrebinjavaw.exe"
if exist "c:Program FilesJavaSoftjre1.2binjavaw.exe" path "c:Program FilesJavaSoftjre1.2bin"
if exist "c:Program FilesJavaSoftjre1.3binjavaw.exe" path "c:Program FilesJavaSoftjre1.3bin"

Simply add a line that points to your location. I also recommend adding a semicolon and then %PATH% to the end so that it doesn’t wipe out your existing path. On my machine, I added this:

Code:

if exist "c:program files (x86)javajre6binjavaw.exe" path "c:program files (x86)javajre6bin";%PATH%

Save and exit, and then double-click launch.bat. It should now fire right up!

–chris