Repair-It

Some would say the hardware is obsolete. In many ways it is. But the deprecated functions that it still needs to perform occasionally are:
1) Play my DVD rip collection on demand with a lean back interface and no BS (surround sound audio, cover art, etc.)
2) Web browser for certain streaming content that is not available via an app on my Fire TV. This use case is more uncommon as DW has a Fire TV app now.

For web connections, it is important to have an up to date OS and browser and Win 7 is....not a good idea to connect to the internet, though it is connected on the inside of a router so the risk is "limited" to connecting to a malicious website which I have some control over.

Anyway, I think the plan is Mint Linux + Kodi as the media center app.

Remaining things to do:
1) I ordered a used SSD and I will just build everything on that so if I screw something up I have the old SSD fully intact.
2) I ordered a used IR receiver as I think mine is actually bad
3) Install Mint, Kodi, configure everything to optimal HTPC settings (like auto login).

I think this plan is actually pretty solid.

Opened the system up, did some dusting that probably hasn't happened in 10 years and installed the new (used) Samsung SSD. It wouldn't boot off the USB drive until I put it into the hard drive boot order but then it worked. In the live environment, that brings us to the first real problem. The network adapter. I ignored that to check other things. Got the optical audio output working which was just a matter of selecting it. But more on this later. Good enough. Time to install Mint. After that, I installed Kodi and told it where my media was. This seemed to be going well. Back to network issues though. I was able to update software and stuff but browser activities were....weird and slow. And uplink seemed totally broken. Then somewhere in there Kodi seemed to stop working?? But that was a false alarm. Turns out my storage drives just weren't auto mounting. Adam helped by helping me read the log file which seemed to indicate it just couldn't find the file. So I turned off the default settings for drive mounting, exposing a check box for auto mounting, and that was resolved.

Also turned on auto log in and disabled requiring password after sleep and stuff like that (need that functionality for an HTPC).

Overall I made good progress, but issues remain. Here they are:
- Network driver is crap. I PROBABLY will have to buy a NIC but it's not clear if the GPU fan leaves enough room for another card. I could do something simple like a USB wireless thingy because all the media is on this machine. I just need web browsing and stuff to work properly. I'll figure something out, or do a bit more research on the Atheros driver situation and try a few more things. This one is annoying but seems resolvable.
- Surround sound output doesn't work. Kodi sees the surround audio track in the DVD rips but the light on my receiver doesn't turn on and it seems to be a stereo downmix. I need to do some research to see what I can do to enable it to pass the surround signal like WMC did. I'm a little worried about this one but I HOPE I can get it working.
- Still waiting for my new IR remote receiver so I can test if my old remote works with Kodi the way I expect.
- Need to auto start Kodi
- Explore Kodi, make sure I understand the interface, can access the media that I want to, make sure the performance is acceptable once it loads and settles down. Was getting some bad lag, but then it speeds up again. Unclear if that is just loading a cache or something else is going on.

That's really the HTPC-specific list. General stuff includes just optimizing Mint and settings to see if there is any optimization I can do. It takes forever to boot for example. This is a lower priority to be honest.

I am having more problems than I expected after the Vaio and other HP computer success but I would say I'm also not surprised because I knew there would be annoying stuff to work through. I also think people are writing checks that the actual Linux experience can't cash - "install Linux and everything works faster and better." Windows 7 had no network problems or surround sound output problems and WMC was better than Kodi at least in my experience so far.

Hopefully it's worth it. I really don't want to go back to Windows 7, but also this setup may never be quite as good as 7MC no matter what the Linux people say. And to be fair, this is PROBABLY better than Win 10 would be on this system (which itself is about to be out of support). And Win 10 has no WMC. So there's that.

Just remember, from an OS standpoint by installing the latest Linux Mint on this old machine, you're doing the equivalent of installing Windows 11 on it.

That said, it should boot very fast. This is probably partially related to the issues you're seeing with the NIC. To confirm, boot without the Ethernet cable installed. This will cause the OS to not try to bring up the interface and any network-depended services will not wait. Also, as a general purpose OS, Mint is very likely starting things you don't need.

Anecdotally, I haven't encountered any hardware/driver issues on any of my Intel Xth generation core machines running the latest Linux distro. I have, however encountered issues on older hardware attempting to run the latest.

Sometimes the driver is no longer included in a "standard" kernel build requiring me to either build it or find a repo with a pre-compiled package to install. On rare occasions I've seen issues like you're setting where some incompatibility between the specific hardware and the driver require using non-default settings for the driver or other kernel setting as a workaround.

Conveniently, in your case, there's plenty of hardware out there that doesn't experience this issue, so for minimal cost you can avoid this problem entirely. This isn't a new thing - remember working through issues back in the day trying to get hardware that worked great on XP to work on Win7? This is just more of that.

Linux does have some additional options - you saw the driver maintainer's emails in the modinfo output. You can also download the source and investigate the issue yourself of you need another hobby.

I also need to see if I can get my wireless keyboard and trackpad working because it was working in Windows 7.

Adam wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 6:15 am Just remember, from an OS standpoint by installing the latest Linux Mint on this old machine, you're doing the equivalent of installing Windows 11 on it.

Yes that's true. Nothing is for free - so a current Linux isn't guaranteed to run better than a period correct Windows. But the trade off seems reasonable from a security and supportability standpoint.

Adam wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 6:15 am That said, it should boot very fast. This is probably partially related to the issues you're seeing with the NIC. To confirm, boot without the Ethernet cable installed. This will cause the OS to not try to bring up the interface and any network-depended services will not wait. Also, as a general purpose OS, Mint is very likely starting things you don't need.

Yes that is a good point and I am sure I can optimize there. A lot of the time probably is waiting for some nonsense to happen that can be cut out.

Adam wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 6:15 am Anecdotally, I haven't encountered any hardware/driver issues on any of my Intel Xth generation core machines running the latest Linux distro. I have, however encountered issues on older hardware attempting to run the latest.

Given the $16 I spent for a Samsung 250GB SSD I should consider just ordering another one and throwing Mint on the Vaio. I want to see how usable the laptop is when factoring in both performance and compatibility. It was very good under Win 8 and 8.1 - 10 years ago. Not as great under Win 10.

Adam wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 6:15 am Conveniently, in your case, there's plenty of hardware out there that doesn't experience this issue, so for minimal cost you can avoid this problem entirely. This isn't a new thing - remember working through issues back in the day trying to get hardware that worked great on XP to work on Win7? This is just more of that.

Linux does have some additional options - you saw the driver maintainer's emails in the modinfo output. You can also download the source and investigate the issue yourself of you need another hobby.

I think it was a good example of the mindset difference while screwing around with trying to auto mount. Who knows how much more time it would have taken to auto mount via CLI but copilot gave me instructions that worked in the Mint GUI in only a few minutes. If you view every problem as a fun puzzle to solve, then I get it. I like computers but I also just need them to work sometimes and the HTPC has a specific function.

Remote receiver works?

Also may need to do this for pass through surround. Because of course.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=356360

kevm14 wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 4:47 am Overall I made good progress, but issues remain. Here they are:
- Network driver is crap. I PROBABLY will have to buy a NIC but it's not clear if the GPU fan leaves enough room for another card. I could do something simple like a USB wireless thingy because all the media is on this machine. I just need web browsing and stuff to work properly. I'll figure something out, or do a bit more research on the Atheros driver situation and try a few more things. This one is annoying but seems resolvable.
- Surround sound output doesn't work. Kodi sees the surround audio track in the DVD rips but the light on my receiver doesn't turn on and it seems to be a stereo downmix. I need to do some research to see what I can do to enable it to pass the surround signal like WMC did. I'm a little worried about this one but I HOPE I can get it working.
- Still waiting for my new IR remote receiver so I can test if my old remote works with Kodi the way I expect.
- Need to auto start Kodi
- Explore Kodi, make sure I understand the interface, can access the media that I want to, make sure the performance is acceptable once it loads and settles down. Was getting some bad lag, but then it speeds up again. Unclear if that is just loading a cache or something else is going on.

That's really the HTPC-specific list. General stuff includes just optimizing Mint and settings to see if there is any optimization I can do. It takes forever to boot for example. This is a lower priority to be honest.

Sitrep.

- Network driver is still crap. It seems to work ok outside a browser environment. Browser stuff is terrible but kinda works. Like I did play a youtube video, eventually. I ordered a $10 TP Link USB to ethernet dongle thing that will probably fix this issue. Fortunately I don't need gigabit on this machine since everything is local.
- Didn't fix surround sound yet. But LibreELEC distro may also be built with the correct audio setup for this kind of thing. At some point I may give up and actually just try this as I think this machine is primarily a Kodi box and LibreELEC is a Linux distro designed around exactly that.
- Got my HP remote receiver. Definitely acted really weird and I did a bunch of stuff like install lirc. Currently, it is working. So I guess I have a remote again. Did have to replace the batteries in the remote as the range was like 3 feet. It will put the machine to sleep with the power button but will NOT wake it up yet. I tried enabling the USB device to allow wake but I think it is still turning off the device so I need to look into this more.
- Auto started Kodi using the Mint GUI for that.
- Unplugged a dongle for another wireless remote and that seemed to be the #1 reason my boots were slow. Seems to go from POST to Kodi in 40 seconds or so? I guess I could continue to optimize but this is acceptable. - Plugged in one of me three BT dongles that did not work in Win 7. One of them worked and after a reboot, my original wireless keyboard/trackpad thing works! Jury still out on if I have optimized my video playback performance. I may try an ATI toolbox thingy and see if I can disable something for video playback.
Here is GPU utilization playing Up. Seems to hover around the 50% range. I didn't assess framerate but this is definitely lower than the next one where I do find it juddery. Actually I made a video only. Truman Show is more in the 85% range and is juddery. But I turned down the scaling and while quality dropped, and GPU utilization went down, I think the juddery playback was still present? Need to try other source I guess.

https://digiex.net/threads/kodibuntu-ko ... ote.13654/

https://www.flynsarmy.com/2015/05/enabl ... b-in-kodi/

More wake on USB resources. It worked in Win 7 so I don't see how it could be the MB even though "wake on USB" isn't a choice in the BIOS.

ALSA sound mixer info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeOuseUqe9Y

Another one on Linux audio more generally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfPU9CD9GSQ

Found out VLC plays DVDs with the correct frame rate and not excessive GPU load. The image quality is worse (but probably about the same as 7MC was on this hardware?), so Kodi just be doing something extra.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?ti ... pid3123132

Got my TP Link USB to ethernet dongle.

Good news: I am able to saturate my internet speeds. That's better than expected and this is far superior to what the NIC was doing with the broken driver.

Bad news: it kills my CPU. This is probably not an issue for how this machine will be used.