2012-02-26 22:28 - General
I spent the vast majority of this weekend turning the machine I've used as a general purpose server for years into an HTPC also, with XBMC.It started by reconfiguring the kernel, because I never previously built the video drivers in. And since it was the first time I took this effort in quite a while, I upgraded from 2.6 to 3.3. That took some effort, because no shortage of things have been renamed and reorganized in the intervening time.
One of those things is the driver for my simple home automation dongle to send power commands (including the external drive that my nightly backups go to). Took a while to find a replacement for that, as some of the kernel stuff moved userland.
The biggest and worst bit, though, was getting the audio to go out, along with the video, over HDMI. I think it all boiled down to passing "radeon.audio=1" (reference: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature#line-87 ), but I had to chase quite a few wild geese before I found that out.