In a previous post I’d talked about how to run MythTV, the very popular multimedia software, under Microsoft Windows (you can find that post here). The basic problem is that MythTV only runs under Linux — there’s no such thing as a port of that application to Windows. That previous post talks about how it’s possible to use a virtual machine to set up a Linux virtual machine within a Windows OS so that Windows users can run MythTV, with a few caveats.

Now that I’ve been using andLinux I wanted to see if it was possible to run MythTV on a Windows installation without having to use a virtual machine. It is — and here’s how.

The Basics

First of all, of course, you have to have andLinux installed on your Windows OS. If you’re not really sure what andLinux is or how it’s different that a virtual machine you should read my previous post, “andLinux — an easy way to run Linux applications right on your Windows desktop“.

Installing MythTV

Once you have your andLinux installation up and running you can install MythTV just like you’d install any other Linux application — using Synaptic (for a GUI installer) or using apt-get (from the command line). Once MythTV is installed remember that you first have to run the “mythtv-setup” script, just like you would with any other installation of MythTV.

Some Caveats

Using andLinux to run MythTV under Windows has the same set of limitations that we ran into when we ran MythTV under a virtual machine. Those limitations are a result of the way that andLinux (or our VMWare virtual machine) see the hardware we have in our Windows system.

TV Tuner

The MythTV application running under andLinux has the same problem as it would running under the virtual machine — it has no way of seeing a TV tuner card in your PC. The solution to the problem is the same as it was when we used a virtual machine –use a tuner card which is located on the network instead of a tuner card which is located in a PC. In my case I use the HDHomeRun by Silicon Dust. You can find a more detailed description of that tuner in a post that I’d written here.

Watching Video

Just like the problem with the tuner card, watching video through the MythTV front-end running under andLinux suffers from the same problem as running MythTV from within a virtual machine. In both cases the problem is that the Linux OS isn’t using your graphics card directly; instead, it’s using either a virtual graphics card (in the case of the virtual machine) or an X-Server (in the case of andLinux). In either case there just isn’t enough graphics horsepower to be able to display full-motion video with no choppiness.

There are other ways to view shows which are recorded in MythTV though, and I cover some of the more popular solutions in the previous article I’d written about running MythTV under windows. These solutions may not be as simple as using the MythTV front-end but they will do the job.

Conclusion

Using andLinux to run MythTV is certainly a viable alternative to running MythTV within a virtual machine, especially with the simplified Linux installation made possible by using andLinux. If you’re a Windows user who’s interested in checking our MythTV I think that using andLinux is the simplest way to see what all of the fuss is about.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with a piece of software named andLinux which allows me to run my Linux application from within Windows without using a virtual machine or any other type of emulation. Let’s check it out.

The Promise

andLinux is an application which gives you the ability to run Linux applications right on your Windows desktop. To understand how it does that we’ll first have to look at another piece of software which is at the core of andLinux. That core piece of software is name coLinux.

The Foundation

coLinux is a port of the Linux kernel which has been compiled to run on Windows. That means that it doesn’t have have rely on a virtual machine to be able to run on Windows — the kernel itself runs like any other Windows application. Because it’s a Windows application that means that it has access to your system’s CPU, memory, and hard drives. Don’t worry, though — coLinux was written to run cooperatively with Windows, not as a competitor. You choose how much of your physical memory you want coLinux to be able to use and what type of access (if any) to your hard drive you’d like to grant to it.

The Packaging

andLinux takes this coLinux kernel, bundles in a bunch of Linux applications, and wraps it into an easy-to-install package. For instance, the basic coLinux installation doesn’t include any type of graphical display ability. That means that if you had installed only coLinux and wanted to be able to use something other than the console (command line) you’d have to install and configure either some type of X-server (to run the apps locally in some sort of GUI) or a VNC server (to connect remotely and run the apps in a VNC desktop). andLinux saves you all of that trouble and automatically installs and configures the XMing X-Server. It also handles configuring its own connection to your PC’s network adapter by installing a virtual network adapter (called TAP-win32) and its own connection to your PC’s sound card using a utility called PulseAudio.

Running your Linux Applications

Once you’ve installed andLinux you can open any of the bundled Linux applications just like you would open any of your Windows applications (your Linux applications don’t appear under the Windows “Start” menu — they’re started from the andLinux KDE icon running in the system tray). If there are additional Linux applications you’d like to install you can just use the included Synaptic installation program, just like you would use in any other “normal” KDE Linux installation. Nothing special need to be done to install or configure those additional applications (with very few exceptions). Open Synaptic, choose the application you’d like to install, and Synaptic will do the rest.

Accessing your Windows files

It’s up to you to decide how much of your Windows file system you’d like to expose to andLinux. By default your Linux applications won’t be able to see any of the Windows files or directories on your hard drive. If you’d like to be able to easily copy files between Windows and your Linux apps you can use the included COFS or Samba packages to access your Windows shares from within your Linux OS.

Where’s the OS?

andLinux uses a kind of virtual file system to store the Linux OS and all of the Linux applications. This virtual file system is located under the Windows directory where you’ve installed andLinux. The file “base.drv” contains the OS and the applications (about 4GB when you initially install andLinux) and the file swap.drv contains the swap file used by the Linux OS. As you add and remove applications the size of the base.drv file changes accordingly. The Linux applications can only see this file system, not your Windows file system.

Benefits of andLinux

There are a number of ways to run Linux applications under a Windows OS. As I’d mentioned before, you can use VMWare to create a complete virtual machine and run your Linux OS within that machine. Alternatively, you can use a tool called Cygwin which acts as a kind of emulator and will translate many of your Linux OS calls to their equivalent Windows OS calls.

While both of these solutions are effective, neither can match andLinux in the areas of speed and simplicity. andLinux is lightning-fast because it doesn’t have to go through the emulation or translation steps required by VMWare or Cygwin to execute its Linux calls. Remember — the Linux kernel which it uses is already a Windows executable.

Not only is andLinux fast — it’s also easy to set up and use. The installation package only asks you a few questions and handles everything else on its own. Once you’ve installed andLinux your Linux apps are right there on your desktop, not in their own virtual machine or VNC connection. Need to edit a file? Now you can simply choose between Notepad or WordPad or their KDE equivalents, KWrite and Kate. Want to open a browser? You can choose between IE or the KDE browser, Konqueror. andLinux allows your Windows applications and your Linux applications to run side-by-side on your Windows desktop.

Conclusion

So that’s andLinux. If you’re a Windows user and you’d like a simple way to play around with Linux give andLinux a shot. Who knows — you just might find some Linux applications that work better than their Windows counterparts, or even some interesting applications which don’t have any Windows counterparts. If you’re a Linux user who’s forced to use a Windows machine this may be just what you need to run those Linux applications without having to go through the hassle of dual-booting or installing a virtual machine.

andLinux is free, it’s fast, it’s simple, and it works. Check it out.

You may have heard of MythTV, the free TiVo-like application that can handle just about all of your multimedia needs. It can record and play back TV shows, including HDTV programming. It can be used to view your pictures, your weather forecast, and your favorite RSS feeds. It can rip and play back your music CD’s and your DVD’s. It can even display the list of movies you have in your NetFlix queue.

And it only runs on Linux.

So what if you’re a Windows user who wants to find out what MythTV is all about? Up until recently you couldn’t, but now you can. Here’s how.

The Background

While it’s true that MythTV only runs on Linux, that doesn’t mean that you’re out of luck if you only have a Windows box. Now that virtual machines are easy to install (not to mention free) we can run a Linux virtual machine on a Windows PC and we can install MythTV into that Linux OS. (If you’re not familiar with virtual machines you can find my previous posts on the subject here. I’d start with this one.)

The problem with running MythTV this way has to do with the way virtual machines handle physical hardware. The OS running within the virtual machine doesn’t see the actual hardware you have — it sees an abstracted view of your hardware. For example, let’s say that you have ATI’s latest-and-greatest graphics card on the PC in which you’ve installed VMWare. If you ask the OS running within VMWare what graphics card it’s using it will report back that it’s using a graphics card called “VMWare SVGA II PCI Display Adapter”. Now, in reality, there is no graphics card named that, but that’s how VMWare works its magic. The same kind of abstraction takes place for all of your physical hardware, including the CPU, the sound card — even the BIOS is abstracted (it looks like the old Intel 440BX chipset).

The benefit of this abstraction is that a virtual machine that’s created on a PC running Windows can be run on any other machine with VMWare installed, even if it’s running a different OS. To the OS running within the virtual machine nothing has changed. The BIOS seen by that OS is still the Intel 440BX and the graphics card is still the VMWare SVGA II PCI adapter.

The downside of that abstraction layer is that all of that high-end graphics processing power that you have in your card can’t be used by the OS running within that virtual machine. Forget playing games in that virtual machine, unless you’re planning on playing Solitaire.

The abstraction layer also presents problems for running MythTV within a virtual machine. The hardware seen within the virtual machine won’t include your PC’s TV tuner card so your MythTV won’t be able to record any shows. To make matters worse, even if you could record shows your abstracted graphics card probably isn’t powerful enough to play video back smoothly. Fortunately there are ways around both of those problems.

The Trick

So how are we going to use MythTV running within a virtual machine to record TV programming when it can’t see our PC’s TV tuner card? We’re going to use a TV tuner that’s not in our PC — it’s on the network. Silicon Dust has released a small device called the HDHomeRun (read my review of what it is, how it works, and how to use it here). In a nutshell, the HDHomeRun contains two HDTV tuners and outputs its video onto your home network. Fortunately, the latest versions of MythTV contain support for using the video stream that the HDHomeRun sends across your network as a video source, just like you’d use your PC’s TV tuner card as a video source.

Now we have everything we need to run MythTV on Windows.

The Pieces

Here’s what you’ll need to be able to run MythTV on your Windows PC:

• A PC running Windows
• VMWare’s free VMWare Player
• Silicon Dust’s HDHomeRun
• A Linux distribution
• MythTV

The Architecture

The MythTV software has two main components: the “Backend” and the “Frontend”. The Backend contains the “guts” of MythTV. It’s the Backend that’s responsible for recording, storing, and retrieving shows. The Frontend is what the typical Myth user uses to schedule and view recorded shows, listen to music, access the weather — basically any type of interaction with Myth can happen through the Frontend. In our example the Backend is mandatory and the Frontend is optional.

The Steps

Rather than going into excruciatingly detailed step-by-step instructions I’m just going to list the basic steps and point you to other places which contain excruciatingly detailed step-by-step instructions.

Step 1: Download and install the VMWare Player. You can get the VMWare Player here.

Step 2: Create a virtual machine. I’m using Ubuntu Linux version 6.10 as the OS within my virtual machine. The installation of Ubuntu is straight-forward and installing MythTV on Ubuntu is simpler than on some other Linux distributions. You can read my step-by-step guide to creating an Ubuntu virtual machine here.

Step 3: Install the MythTV Backend into your virtual machine. You can find good instructions for installing MythTV on Ubuntu here. Optionally, you can also install the Frontend.

Step 4: Configure your MythTV backend to use the HDHomeRun as its video input. Silicon Dust provides detailed instructions on how to do that here.

Viewing the Results

Now that we can record TV shows using our virtualized MythTV Backend we need some way to view those shows. Most users of MythTV use the MythTV Frontend to watch recorded shows on their Linux boxes. Earlier I’d mentioned that the way in which virtualization abstracts our hardware means that a virtual OS probably won’t be able to play our recorded show smoothly. Fortunately there are other ways to watch our recorded shows without using the MythTV Fontend.

MythTV Player

MythTV Player is a Windows application which can play the programs you’ve recorded using MythTV. It’s not designed to be a full Windows-based replacement for the MythTV Frontend but it will allow you to watch recorded shows.

UPnP

The latest versions of MythTV include a UPnP server. If you have a UPnP client such as Nero’s Showtime you can browse and watch your recorded shows on your PC. There are also some newer DVD players such as the DLink DSM320/520 which are capable of acting as UPnP clients.

Roku HD1000

If you have a Roku HD1000 hooked to your television you can use the MythRoku application to watch your recorded shows. MythRoku doesn’t provide a full-featured replacement for the Frontend but it allows you to play back video that’s been recorded with your MythTV Backend.

XBMCMythTV

If you’ve modified your XBox into an XBMC you can use the XBMCMythTV script to view your recorded shows. While it’s not a full-fledged replacement for the Frontend it allows you to schedule recordings as well as to view recorded shows.

WinMyth

WinMyth is a Windows version of the MythTV Frontend but it’s not up to date with the latest version of the protocol that MythTV uses. When WinMyth is updated it should also be able to stream back recorded shows.

Samba Shares

While not quite as elegant as the other solutions you could always use Samba to set up an SMB share on the directory in your virtual machine which contains the recorded shows. You’d see the raw filenames of the recorded shows rather than the “nice” names (“2100_20061213221800.mpg” instead of “Lost”) but you’d be able to view the recorded .mpg files using any device or program which can see network shares.

Other Notes

Here are some things to keep in mind if you’re considering setting up a MythTV installation following these steps.

MythTV Versions

Be careful about which version of the MythTV Backend you download and install, especially if you’re planning on using other 3rd-party software which is expecting a particular version of the Backend. As of today the latest version of MythTV available through CVS is using Protocol 32. If you’re planning on using that version make sure that the 3rd-party apps you’re going to use know how to speak using that protocol.

MythTV Frontend

You’re going to need some way to tell your MythTV which shows you want to record. One way is to install a copy of the MythTV Frontend into the same virtual machine that’s running your Backend. While it’s true that you probably won’t be able to use that Frontend to view recorded shows because of its abstracted hardware you can still use it to set up recordings. Even if you have some other means of setting up your recordings, like using the XBMCMythTV script on your XBox, you can still use the Frontend for other things, like viewing the weather reports or reading your RSS feeds.

If you’d rather not install a Frontend you could just always just use the web-based interface to set up your recordings.

Disk Space

Recordings from MythTV can be big. Very big. If you’re planning on recording HDTV programming they’ll be even bigger. You need to make sure that you have enough disc space allocated to handle those recordings. If you’re planning on storing the records on your virtualized MythTV Backend make sure that you allocate enough space when you create the virtual machine. Alternatively, you can set up your Backend to save its records somewhere other than in the virtual machine by setting up a mount point which points to a share on another server or NAS.

The Conclusion

For years Windows users have had to use alternatives to MythTV because there just wasn’t any way to run Myth outside of Linux. Technically speaking that’s still the case, but now, with the capabilities of virtual machines and Silicon Dust’s HDHomeRun, Windows users can use a little magic to crash the Myth party.

Now get in there and see what you’ve been missing.

Update: I’ve found another way to run MythTV under Windows by using a piece of software named andLinux.  You can find a post about that here.

The free VMWare Player is a very powerful and simple way to run virtual machines on your PC. You install the VMWare Player software, download some pre-configured virtual machines, and can run just about any other operating system from the comfy confines of your favorite operating system (Windows or Linux) without ever having to worry about messing up your favorite operating system. (You can read a more in-depth description of the VMWare Player from one of my previous posts, “VMWare: See How the Other Half Lives“)

VMWare also makes the VMWare Server software, which gives you a lot more control over your virtual machines, including a wizard that you can use to create your own virtual machine. VMWare Server is also free but may be a bit too complex for the user who simply wants to try out a different OS.

That leaves us with the choice between the simple VMWare Player, which you use to run pre-configured virtual machines, and the more complicated VMWare Server, which allows you to create your own virtual machines. But what if a user wants the simplicity of the VMWare Player and the ability create their own virtual machines from scratch? It’s actually quite easy to do.

In simplified terms the VMWare Player is really just the VM runtime component of the VMWare Server, including all of the abstracted hardware components that the virtual machine needs in order to be able to run. That means that the Player uses the same configuration file as the Server, and that means that you can use the VM creation wizard from the Server to create a configuration file that will also work with the Player.

If you don’t have the Server application you can still create the configuration file — you’ll just have to do it manually. The configuration file that VMWare uses for both their Player and Server is just a text file. As long as you know what settings are required to define and run the virtual machine you can use a simple text editor to create a configuration file that will work with the Player. So, in reality you’ve always been able to create your own VM’s to be used with VMWare Player, as long as you understand what to put into that configuration file. Or, you can take the easy way out. In this case that would be the EasyVMX way out.

EasyVMX is a website which provides a simple way to create that configuration file without having to understand everything that it contains. There’s nothing that the EasyVMX website does that you couldn’t accomplish by creating and editing that configuration file with a simple text editor — it just makes it much easier, not to mention reducing the chance of errors in your configuration file.

The site gives you three different ways to create your VM configuration file using three configuration screen targeted to users with different technical needs:

• “Super Simple Edition” – you pick the name of the VM that you’re creating, choose the type of OS, and the amount of memory and drive space you’d like the VM to have. That’s it.
• EasyVMX! (normal) – in addition to the choices provided in the Super Simple Edition you also have an opportunity to modify settings such as network and disk configurations.
• Expert – all options which are available in a VMWare configuration file.

Let’s walk through a practical example. I already have VMWare Player installed on my Windows OS and I’d like to create a virtual machine so that I can try out the latest version of the Ubuntu operating system.

Step-by-step Walkthrough

The first thing I have to do is download the Ubuntu installation CD image (.iso) file from here. I’ll store the file right on the root of my “C:\” drive. If I was installing Ubuntu onto a “real” machine I’d have to take the downloaded file and burn it onto a CD or DVD before I could use it but since we’re going to be using a virtual machine we can skip that step. If you’d like to burn it to a CD you can do that, too — just skip the step below which talks about adding the 2nd CD-ROM drive.

The next step is to set up our VMWare Player configuration file. Go the EasyVMX website and choose the “EasyVMX!” link. In the Basic Configuration section we’ll assign a name to this virtual machine container, choose the type of OS, the amount of memory the VM is going to be use, and the number of CPU’s (in the case of VMWare Player you’re limited to 1).

Next we’ll have to decide how we’re going to handle networking. I like to use the “Bridged” setting, which basically means that the virtual machine is to be treated like any other OS you may have running on your network. That way it will have it’s own IP address which it will get either from your DHCP server or by static assignment.

Since we downloaded the .iso image but didn’t burn it to a CD we’ll have to tell the VMWare Player what to do. If you have a physical CD image instead of just an .iso file you can skip this step completely.

By default your PC’s CD-ROM drive gets mapped as the “Master” CD-ROM drive in the virtual machine. We’ll add a 2nd CD-ROM drive to the virtual machine and point it to the Ubuntu .iso file we downloaded earlier. From the virtual machine’s perspective it will look like a 2nd CD-ROM drive with our Ubuntu disc loaded into it. (Please note that the file name shown truncated below is the complete file name to the .iso file: “C:\ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso”) If you plan to use an actual CD to install your VM’s OS you can skip this step and just use the Master CD-ROM drive.

Next we tell EasyVMX how large we’d like the virtual machine’s hard drive to be. In this example I’m going to use a single 4GB drive. Remember, the virtual machine can’t see your PC’s hard drive at all — all it sees is what you define here.

That’s about all we need to define in our virtual machine to get Ubuntu up and running. Now we just tell EasyVMX that we’re ready to go and it’ll generate a .zip file containing everything we need to create our virtual machine. Open up that .zip file and copy the contents to the directory where the virtual machine is going to live. Remember to make sure that the location you choose for your virtual machine has enough free drive space. In our example above we told EasyVMX that we wanted to set aside 4GB for this virtual machine so we need to make sure that the directory we use as the location of our virtual machine has at least 4GB of free space available.

Here I’ve unzipped the file that EasyVMX created for me and copy the contents into my Eds_Ubuntu_Desktop directory. Although we specified that the virtual machine was going to be 4GB large it isn’t using more than 1MB of drive space yet. The files which are used as the VM’s hard drive will grow as needed up to the 4GB size we specified.

Now we’re ready to fire up our virtual machine. You can either double-click on the .vmx file in the virtual machine directory or you can start up VMWare Player (Start -> VMWare -> VMWare Player) and point it to the .vmx file. You’ll see VMWare start your virtual machine just like it would start a “real” system. The VM’s BIOS will first look to the VM’s hard drive to boot an OS but it won’t find anything there (remember, we haven’t actually installed the OS yet). If you’re using the .iso file you’ll have to disable the Master CD-ROM and enable the Slave “CD-ROM 2″ by clicking on those buttons at the top of the player so the VM will boot from the .iso image and not from the Master CD-ROM drive. And away it goes……

The Ubuntu CD is a “live” CD — it runs itself from memory instead of from your hard drive in order to give you a chance to check it out. If you decide that you like what you see you can double-click on the “Install” icon on the VM’s desktop to launch the Ubuntu installer which will install the OS to your hard drive. The installer will ask you the standard questions (pick your timezone, set up your partitions, etc.) and then will copy its files to your new partition. Remember, it’s not installing Ubuntu onto your PC’s hard drive — it’s installing Ubuntu onto the 4GB virtual hard drive that we’d set up earlier.

Once Ubuntu is installed onto your VM’s hard drive it will ask you to remove the CD-ROM from the drive and to restart your system. If you used an actual CD-ROM drive go ahead and eject it, otherwise we need to re-enable the Master CD-ROM drive by clicking on the CD-ROM button at the top of the player. Once you’re removed the CD-ROM disc or re-attached the Master CD-ROM drive tell Ubuntu to go ahead and restart the system. It thinks it rebooting your PC but what it’s really doing, of course, is restarting your virtual machine.

The virtual machine restarts and you get to the Ubuntu login screen.

That’s it — you have a fully-functional Ubuntu installation running from within your VMWare Player. Sure, you could’ve just downloaded a pre-existing Ubuntu virtual machine from the VMWare website but, by doing it this way, you know exactly what’s in that virtual machine because you’re the one who put it there. Besides, there are times when you’ll need to know how to create your own VM. For example, you won’t find any Microsoft Windows VM’s on VMWare’s website because of licensing issues. Using this technique you can create a Windows virtual machine just like we did for our Ubuntu virtual machine.

One additional bonus from running an OS in a virtual machine is thatyou can just shut down the VM and the contents of its memory will be saved as a file, much like putting your PC in Hibernation dumps the contents of its memory to its hard drive. When you run the VM again the file will be loaded back into the VM’s memory and you’ll pick up right where you left off without having to wait for the OS to complete its normal boot process.

VMWare Player makes it easy to run virtual machines on your PC, and EasyVMX makes it easy to create those virtual machines. Now you, too, can Ubuntu.