Which Ubuntu version is best for me?

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Which Ubuntu version is best for me? - SofaKng - 2009-02-25

Here is my hardware:

Intel C2D E8400 (cpu)
Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H (motherboard)

The motherboard has a built-in nVidia 9400 HDMI card as well as S/PDIF (optical) output that I will be using. (eg. HDMI for video and S/PDIF for audio)

I've heard that Ubuntu Intrepid + XBMC has problems utilizing both cpu cores, but Ubuntu Hardy doesn't support newer hardware.

Which one is better for me to use? (or are there other versions of Ubuntu that I should be using?)

Thanks for any help!

- rodercot - 2009-02-25

sofakng Wrote:Here is my hardware:

Intel C2D E8400 (cpu)
Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H (motherboard)

The motherboard has a built-in nVidia 9400 HDMI card as well as S/PDIF (optical) output that I will be using. (eg. HDMI for video and S/PDIF for audio)

I've heard that Ubuntu Intrepid + XBMC has problems utilizing both cpu cores, but Ubuntu Hardy doesn't support newer hardware.

Which one is better for me to use? (or are there other versions of Ubuntu that I should be using?)

Thanks for any help!

Well Since you are attempting to get a brand new board to work I would suggest Intrpeid. You can use the intrepid PPA from XBMC for now for stability and test the xbmc-vdpau branch for unloading to GPU.

Once the VD-pau is mainstream the CPU issue although still an issues will not affect playback nearly as much IF at all.

Intrpeid will support your hardware pretty much out of the box following Olympia's guide for the P5N7A-VM in the XBMC wiki, your board although a GB will be very similar to the Asus we are using.

Good Luck.

Dave

- SofaKng - 2009-02-25

Thanks for the quick reply.

Is it better to use the Intrepid PPA or follow the installation guides for installing it myself? (eg. does the PPA include drivers that wouldn't apply to my system but just cause it to run slower, etc?)

I think I'm also going to try the VDPAU SVN builds so I might use my slower E6600 chip for testing, etc.

- rodercot - 2009-02-25

sofakng Wrote:Thanks for the quick reply.

Is it better to use the Intrepid PPA or follow the installation guides for installing it myself? (eg. does the PPA include drivers that wouldn't apply to my system but just cause it to run slower, etc?)

I think I'm also going to try the VDPAU SVN builds so I might use my slower E6600 chip for testing, etc.

HI,

Not a problem, I was not sure what your comfort level was with the different builds, but if you are confident in using the SVN version then by all means. I run r17292 on all my regular systems which are mythbuntu 8.10 and then I run the latest SVN on my test machine for playing around.

I am not sure I follow regarding the ppa, all the difference between the ppa and the svn is stability for XBMC and an easier install.

You will still be req'd to get your basesystem configured properly to support XBMC's functions, I.E. following the wiki as I suggested with your intrepid install to get it all working 100% first Then you can install XBMC however you choose.

The reason I use Mythbuntu is all the media related items are already installed and it is not bloated with the rest of the Ubuntu full dis stuff I do not use. the wiki install method gets you to pretty much the same place excluding mythtv.

rgds,

Dave

- volenin - 2009-02-26

8.04 Hardy should also work for you. I've got the ASUS M3N78 vm motherboard and all required hardware got correctly recognized. I'm pretty sure the linux kernel is backported to some degree in order to support newer hardware. Eg, after all the updates I'm running now

uname: Linux eagle 2.6.24-23-generic #1 SMP Mon Jan 26 00:13:11 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

(it's Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.2). If the MB you have is based on nVidia chipset, then as soon as you install the latest nVidia drivers (180.x if I'm not mistaken) everything should be up & running no problem.

Just my 2c.

Vlad

- SofaKng - 2009-02-26

If I CAN run Ubuntu 8.04 than is it better than 8.10? What benefits does 8.10 give me over 8.04?

- BLKMGK - 2009-02-26

8.10 has later video drivers in the repo but installing later ones following the instructions given elsewhere here makes this no big deal. 8.04 seems to load balance better between two cores although I've not had big issues with it on my hardware running 8.10. 8.04 also does not have Pulseaudio which gives some folks fits, another issue I've nto had too much of...

- SofaKng - 2009-02-26

Thank you very much for the information!

I'll probably try installing both (and making hard drive images of the finished installation) and seeing what works best.

- danillll - 2009-02-26

I have the same board Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H and I love it, good choice.
To answer your question, I tried hardy and intrepid, full and minimal versions.
I am using the ps3 remote to control XBMC and It only worked with hardy, so now I have a dual boot, Hardy minimal for XBMC (VDPAU beta version) and intrepid full version for XBMC development.

If you want to use the official version, hence CPU decoding, I would use hardy and not worry about patching the install.

Do a quick GA-E7AUM-DS2H and you'll find most of the problems I ran into along with solutions, if you still have question PM me.

good luck

- SofaKng - 2009-02-26

Thanks for the suggestion!

I've done some searching on your post and it seems like you only needed two fixes:

1) Unmute iec958 (and other items?) in alsa mixer
2) Make sure ram is running in dual mode

Can you think of anything else?

I only need audio via s/pdif (optical) so I don't have to worry about hdmi audio (but I do need hdmi video of course).

- danillll - 2009-02-26

sofakng Wrote:Thanks for the suggestion!

I've done some searching on your post and it seems like you only needed two fixes:

1) Unmute iec958 (and other items?) in alsa mixer
2) Make sure ram is running in dual mode

Can you think of anything else?

I only need audio via s/pdif (optical) so I don't have to worry about hdmi audio (but I do need hdmi video of course).

And make sure to bump the VGA memory to 512 in the bios, especially if you going to use the VDPAU version, which is still beta, but honestly the picture looks much better on my big screen tv, especially after applying the denoise and other filters so I am not bothered with the bugs, because motd2k is aggressively implementing this feature, check the VDPAU thread.

- SofaKng - 2009-02-26

Yeah, I'm planning to bump the memory to 512 MB, thanks!

Are you enabling denoise along with VDPAU?

Which other filters are you using?

Thanks again!

- danillll - 2009-02-26

sofakng Wrote:Yeah, I'm planning to bump the memory to 512 MB, thanks!

Are you enabling denoise along with VDPAU?

Which other filters are you using?

Thanks again!

yes, denoise made a big difference for me, it smoothed out my picture and got rid of all dancing microblacks that I was complaining about in previous posts, again I am not sure what display/movies you are using, but with > 50'' tv, denoise is a must
all other filters work great perfectly, again it depends if you need them or not.

- User 34959 - 2009-02-27

exactly which filters are available atm?

- danillll - 2009-02-27

toiva Wrote:exactly which filters are available atm?

in addition to the brightness and contrast, you have noise reduction, sharpness, ,inverse telecine, hardware deinterlacing, again this is using hardware through the VDPAU API which Nvidia latest and greatest invention. Keep in mind this would only work with Nvidia and on 8.xxx GPU and above.