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Hello all,<br>
Last night 5 of the AV crew got together to document the opening and
rejection of the EULA that came with the three PLUG laptops. These
three machines are the "video ingest" machines that (on our current
set up) simply capture firewire packets and shuffle the DV video out
the Ethernet port, and permit the operator to use mumble to get
directions form the director (on the dvswitch host).<br>
<br>
All three machines were opened and checked, and then had their disks
wiped of all software before booting from the hard disk. We set up
PXE booting with Debian FAI, and then proceeded to install a base OS
on them. At this point in time (Friday morning) the hosts install
Debian Wheezy (testing) with X11, the non-Free Realtek drivers for
the Ethernet NIC[1], gnome 3.0, dvsource, mumble, and the alsa utils
for the tally lights, and installs a user "av". <br>
<br>
I have also done a test capturing video from firewire (using the
ExpressCards) and sending this to dvswitch - all OK - and capturing
from the webcam with transcode to DV with ffmpeg, plus capturing an
ffmpeg screen grab with transcode again - and running dvswitch
0.8.3.6 on one ingest host and the loadav was 0.08 and 60% CPU idle
(though the delay on ffmpeg transcoded sources is around 0.5 sec or
more).<br>
<br>
The next few customisations I'm working on are:<br>
* Pre-configure mumble<br>
* Auto login GDM as the "av" user, and launch mumble<br>
* Do not suspend on laptop lid close<br>
<br>
<br>
I'm after any other input that you think we should have installed
into each of these hosts. I'm looking to have the entire
installation and use scripted so we can re-install at any time - or
add additional hosts easily (for larger presentations where we want
more than 2 cameras + 1 twinpact - though we could add one
additional camera directly on the dvswitch host easily...).<br>
<br>
<br>
The shipping of the firewire cards hit a small snag - only 2 of the
3 ordered had actually turned up; the third is expected in mid
April. <br>
<br>
For those that didn't see earlier, the three identical systems are
Dell Vostro 3400, with a 160 GB HDD, 3 GB RAM, and a 2nd Gen Intel
Core i3 2.3 Ghz with 3 MB cache. Dell indicated an invoice will be
sent after 2 weeks, which we can then claim back the funds from
Lottery West (a further 2 weeks). <br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
James<br>
<br>
<br>
[1] Although most functionality is working without this, one machine
experiences tcp hangs when operating without this, and also
complains about the missing firmware as was seen during a dry run
with the CD installer; so I've added the firmares to the NFS-root
install-time environment, and the installation scripts, along with
the libsmbios-bin utils to read Service Tags, etc, in a class called
"DELL".<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<em>Mobile:</em> +61 422 166 708, <em>Email:</em>
james_AT_rcpt.to<br>
PLUG President 2012: <a href="http//www.plug.org.au">http://www.plug.org.au</a></div>
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