Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Apple TV 1

[Mick]

On Friday, 31 August 2018 17:22:43 BST Andrew Udvare wrote:
> On 8/31/18 11:31 AM, Mick wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Would anyone have *recent* experience of installing and running Gentoo
>
> plus
>
> > Kodi on the above?  It has a Pentium-M with Apple's 32bit EFI.
>
> It also has a GeForce Go 7300 which is still supported. 304.137 of the
> proprietary driver is still in the tree. From what I can tell you will
> be better off with the proprietary driver over Nouveau.
>
> I question if it can handle running Kodi. Maybe you would want to use
> something else for video playback/media management?

Yes, it can run it, at least it could last year using the OSMC build based on 
Dedian.


> You definitely would want to cross-compile everything for this machine
> on a modern system, with minimal dependencies since you only have 512 MB
> of RAM to work with. You can set Kodi to start with xinitrc or you can
> have something like SDDM show Kodi as an option.
>
> Nouveau may work for you other than hardware acceleration of video
> decoding. Maybe that CPU can handle 480P MPEG-2 and non-HD XviD but
> almost certainly not x264 or HEVC (I doubt the OpenGL renderer can help
> here). If you are willing to convert files and use lower resolutions
> then this may be acceptable.

TBH I'm mostly using it for audio, but 720p video plays quite respectably and 
by the time the TV upscales it to 1080 it shows a very acceptable picture.


> https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/
>
> Conflicting information here as Nvidia says there are no VDPAU features
> supported by this graphics card.
> http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/304.137/README/supportedchip
> s.html

What I have not fathomed yet is how to compile into the mach_kernel the 
vmlinuz and initrd the boot.efi uses to boot linux.  :-/

-- 
Regards,
Mick