s-video on my xubuntu box
 

i'm trying to convert an old pc (p3 celeron 1.1ghz, 384mb ram, creative tnt2 ultra) into a media/bittorrent pc in the living room. as such, i would like to pipe the s-video out on my tnt2 ultra to the tv and use it as a monitor/tv-out. i have already loaded the latest xubuntu on it.

question is: how do i make the s-video the "default" video port?

your going to need the drivers from nvidia for this. my tnt2 needed the 'legacy' driver as it is so old.

I think I found it on nvidia.com ... after I install it, how would I config it to do what I want?

you edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf (for X.org I believe thats what xubuntu uses) and set it up for the driver. this is out of mine:
you may have to change that a little but it should get you started. post your xorg.conf if you get stuck.

Hi

I did this a lazier way. First I installed Dapper on the computer (with an old monitor connected), attached the S-video to the TV, and while doing a reboot, I could see the computer booting on the TV :)

But the problem was, when X started, the resolution got too high for the TV. Simply unplugging the monitor solved that (After a reboot).

I don't know about XUbuntu, but for me, it worked with Dapper with no configuration or messing with drivers. Impressive :)

To watch movies or play music I ssh to the computer and start mplayer from the command line.

I had to do two things for this to work:
export DISPLAY=:0.0
login to Gnome with the same user account as the one I use with ssh.

I put the DISPLAY line in bash_profile so I don't have to type it after every logon. From the menus in Gnome, there was a way to set it so it logs in to Gnome automaticly on every boot.

And of course, I needed a cable for audio to my Stereo, which worked great too, with no configuration.

Only thing that didn't work out of the box was codecs. I installed Automatix, and got lots of codecs, fairly easy.

I don't know if I was just lucky? Anyway Ubuntu impressed me :)

this is silly. i'm trying to kill x-server (nvidia wants me to do so before installing) but it refuses to die! i goto runlevel3 and it still tells me x is running. where is etc/inittab?

when i do control-alt-backspace it just brings me to the graphical login. even when i do init 3, x-server seems to be running still.

it's /etc/inittab. runlevel 3 doesn't mean no X. runlevel 3 usually is multi-user no X but it depends how your init scripts are set up; on all my gentoo systems 3 was the default runlevel and I never changed this but I did install X so they are running in 3 with X under normal circumstances. if you suspect X is still running even in runlevel 3 this isn't horrible the only thing I ever had to totaly shutdown X for was installing the nvidia driver; try 'killall X' as root after 'init 3' this should do exactly what it sounds like.

You could also just boot to your "recovery mode" kernel to install the nvidia driver. I think that will work also

How about ctrl alt F1 ? maybe you can kill x there.. it works for me.

this didn't work either ...

this puts it in run level1, and the install program complains that "certain programs may not run well" etc.

when i typed "killall X <enter>" ... it did nothing ...