tOMPSON’s blog

Within the last weeks two friends built their own VDR system and installed ct’ VDR 6.1 on it. I helped them a bit configuring their remote control with lirc but all in all it was a quite smooth installation.

One thing that I had to do on both systems was to correct the time, on both installations it was set an hour to late. This was because the system configuration said that the time is UTC. I do not know if it is
possible to change this in the installation process but here is what I did:

1. Edit the file /etc/default/rcS and change utc=yes to utc=no
2. Check /etc/timezone if correct timezone is configured
3. Run date -s "2008-02-09 10:15:00" to set the current time
4. Write the corrected system time to the underlying hardware clock by calling hwclock --systohc
5. Reboot
6. Install the ntp daemon with apt-get install ntp so that time gets synced from now on

Today I experienced a problem with my VDR linux system I never had in the last years on any linux system. I switched on my system and wondered why I could not connect with ssh. Then I realized that no service was running - no samba, no http, no vdr …

I had to connect the PC to a monitor and start it again to see that every time a service should be started the following message was printed:

Warning: Fake start-stop-daemon called. Doing nothing

It seems like a failed install script changed my start-stop-daemon script and did not rollback the changes. After some search I found that the following command fixes this problem:

apt-get install dpkg --reinstall

Very weird.

The last days were one of those when I ask myself: Do I really need a video recorder with a secure shell

I had some troubles with my VDR. It started three weeks ago when suddenly after working without a problem for about half a year the screen went black. This was caused by an automatic update my Conax module made (see my vdr-portal post for more details).

I took the chance and set up my VDR from scratch with the newest available distro (ct’ VDR 6.1) and I changed my hardware too.

After some frustrating hours of installing and configuring everything works fine now again. I got a new case and changed the motherboard. The toughest part was configuring lirc. The ctvdrcfg tries to install lirc-modules which are only distributed on the ct’ VDR 6.1 cdrom and are not in any repository. After adding the cdrom to my apt sources again I was able to install lirc.

Damn. My cable provider Liwest encrypted all channels today. I was using my VDR now for over three years and now … it is black.

Without a smartcard I will not be able to receive digital TV channels anymore. Now I have to think about a solution - adding a common interface to my VDR and buying a smartcard? Completely change to another device?

From time to time I have to update the channels.conf of my VDR. On the vdr-wiki there is a page which holds regularly updated channel lists for many networks.

I was not able to find a program that allows me to update my existing list with the information from the new list. I want to get the downloaded channel list in the same order as my current list. I tried several program listed here but they are only useful to rearrange the channels.