Intel NUC5i5RYH
Setting Up Iris

Contents

• In the Box
• Assembly Steps
• Quirks when Booting
• BIOS Update
• BIOS Setup
• Power and Speed Measurements
• Brain Transplants
• Installing OpenSuSE 42.1
• USB Bus Structure on NUC5i5RYH

In the Box

Check the box contents and record serial numbers. Try to get the ethernet MAC address so it can be registered with the firewall.

Beware: This machine has no memory, no disc and no operating system. You will need to obtain your operating system from another source. This of course is simple, inexpensive and legal for Linux.

What's in the box:

• The machine itself.
• VESA mounting plate with 75mm and 100mm squares.
• Package of screws: 4 to attach VESA plate to monitor, 2 to attach NUC to VESA plate, 2 smaller ones, pan head, for the disc drive.
• Small sticker saying Intel Inside Core i5.
• Power supply (wall wart); input 100-240V, up to 1.5A, 50-60Hz; output 19VDC, up to 3.43A 65W.
• Interchangeable pins for the power supply. See below for details.
• Documentation: All/No language setup guide; China RoHS declaration; reference to websites for downloading BIOS, and lists of tested M.2 SSDs, and memory; hype for McAfee LiveSafe program.

Wonder of wonders, the MAC address (and the serial number) is on a sticker on the bottom of the machine.

The power supply has interchangeable pins. None of them have a grounding pin. For the type letters see the IEC World Plugs website. These pin assemblies are provided:

• Type A, NEMA 1-15P, 2 parallel flat blades; used in North America, Andean South America, Japan.
• Type C, Europlug, pins 19mm apart and 19mm long, 4mm diameter, with lozenge base; used in most of the European Union (except the UK, Cyprus, etc.), Brazil, Korea, Russia, and a long list of other countries.
• Another Europlug variant with 5mm pins and no lozenge
• Type G, inline blades about 22mm apart center to center, 17mm long, 3mm thick, with a nonconductive (plastic) grounding pin. Used in the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.
• Type I, flat blades turned at 60 degrees, about 14mm center to center and 16mm long; used in Australia, New Zealand, Oceania islands, Argentina, and several others. Not in Brazil.
• China could use any of type A, type C or type I. The official standard specifies type I. They often install a combination socket that takes I, C and A plugs.

Assembly Steps

• To attach the pins to the power supply:

  • It has a cover over the pin area. To remove it, there is a cutout on the side toward the center of the power supply. Press it down and slide the cover off endwise.
  • The pin assembly has a hook which needs to go toward the center of the power supply.
  • Slide the pin assembly into place endwise, similar to how the cover came off. Push it over the steel pins inside. Continue until the hook clicks, grabbing inside.
  • If you need to use different pins (e.g. when travelling), there is a cutout similar to the one on the cover, which you press, then slide off the pins.

• Peel the protective films off the top and front of the machine.

• Remove the screws at each corner of the bottom cover. They are captive; they don't detach from the cover. Flip the cover towards the front of the machine.

• Insert the memory cards. It will help to make them distinguishable, e.g. write 'A' or 'B' on the labels. Repeat this procedure for each one, starting with the bottom socket. (Designated 'A' in the BIOS.) Stick the memory into its socket at about a 30 degree angle, clearing the grabbers of the upper socket. There is a notch that defines the correct orientation. Make it go into the socket so the contacts (103 on each side) are barely visible, well under 1mm exposed. Now rotate the card down flat until the edge grabbers engage. The metal parts of the grabbers should be centered in the half-round notches in the memory card. At this point about 1mm of the contacts are visible.

  To remove a memory card, pry outward on the grabbers until they let go (one at a time). Then rotate the card upward 30 degrees and pull it out.

• Attach the disc to the bottom cover with the two provided screws, using the holes closest to the SATA connector. The circuit board goes against the cover; the label is partly visible through the hole in the drive bay.

  Think ahead to when you are going to remove the drive, years in the future. When sliding the drive into its holder, try not to push it solidly into the SATA socket; stop before the screw holes on the drive are centered in the holder's holes. You will notice that you can't pull the drive out, once it's in.

  A step in my setup plan involved swapping discs. To get the first disc out, I needed to unscrew the drive holder and the bridge over the socket with the foam strip that holds down the M.2 SSD. Then I could get a screwdriver into the gap between the drive and the SATA socket, motivating the drive to let go.

• Insert and screw down the SSD in the M.2 socket, per the setup guide. (I don't actually have a SSD.) Leave alone the foam pad atop the rotating drive bay; they say it's important for thermal management.

• Reattach the bottom cover.

• The WiFi antennae in the top cover are preassembled; you don't have to mess with them.

• The NUC (with memory but no hard disc) wouldn't boot the USB stick. It gave me 3 blinks on the power button (and would have beeped if speakers or phones were plugged in). See Blink and Beep Codes for Intel NUC. 3 blinks means a memory error. Did you get the right kind of memory? Try re-seating the memory [this was my problem; see instructions above for how to insert the memory]. Are the contacts clean? Try to isolate the problem by using only one stick at a time, in the upper or lower socket one at a time. Or swap known good memory into the NUC and swap the new memory into a known good machine, but be sure to label the sticks and be sure it's an exact match in type and voltage.

  Other blink codes: pairs of blinks means no VGA option ROM. This error is disabled by default in the BIOS. 16 fast blinks means excessive temperature. Continual blinking occurs during a BIOS update; this is normal.

Quirks when Booting

When you turn on power, the machine may send video on HDMI, or VGA, or both. It seems random. This means that you may not see the splash screen, particularly since the NUC5i5RYH doesn't have a VGA connector (the NUC6CAYH does). When you are doing a special boot procedure, like setup or booting from USB, when you see the Numlock light on the keyboard and no splash screen, hit your function key anyway, perhaps several times. If it doesn't show you video, press power off and try again.

Booting from USB storage: Get into BIOS setup by pressing F2 during boot. On the left side of the start screen is the Boot Order panel. Use your USB mouse; shift from the UEFI to Legacy tab. Double click on whichever device, to boot from it immediately. Alternatively, press F10 during boot, scroll to the desired device, and press enter.

In a normal BIOS there is a line item for generic USB devices and another for PXE boot, and you can adjust their boot order in the usual way. In the NUC's BIOS there may be checkboxes for Boot USB First or Boot PXE Last. But not on the NUC5i5RYH. If you configure the order of the specific USB stick, then remove it, it is forgotten. You will have to use the F10 menu to boot from it next time.

BIOS Update

How to obtain the latest BIOS version:

• Start at Intel Download Center.
• Search for the product, NUC5i5RYH.
• On the results page, restrict the OS to OS Independent. (Make your life easier.)
• Pick the latest BIOS update; older versions are also on the list. As of 2016-01-27 the latest version is 0353 dated 2015-12-20.
• Now, which package do I want? I bypassed the Windows exe files. RY0353.BIO is the BIOS itself without the installer. Download this one if you will use the BIOS' builtin flasher. RYBDW135.86A.0353.BI.ZIP includes both the BIOS and the installer. Download this one if you are an old troglodyte.
• Agree to the license. It's supposed to automatically start the download, but on Firefox-42 it didn't, so click the download link at the end of the license.

Now that I have a flasher in the form of a MS-DOS EXE file, what am I going to do with it?

• The BIOS includes a flasher.
  • Insert a flash memory stick containing RY0353.BIO . It probably has to be formatted with a VFAT filesystem.
  • Reboot and hit F7 (repeatedly) as it comes up.
  • You drop into BIOS Flash Update. This page is also accessible from the regular setup on F2.
  • The third line says Unknown Device. Scroll down to this line and hit Enter.
  • It lists all the files whose names end in .BIO (in my case just one). Scroll down to the one you want and hit Enter.
  • After a confirmation box, it reboots and starts flashing the power button light. It shows progress messages; the Main Block Firmware takes the longest time. Total time about 80 seconds. It then reboots normally.
  • If you drop into setup (F2), you can verify that the new BIOS version is installed.
• Alternatively if you do not use the builtin flasher, see my procedure for flashing, dated 2010-11-14. Dated is the operative word here -- it assumes you're going to have a CD drive. I could make that happen, but instead I'm going to do this on USB flash memory.
• Instead I have a USB flash memory stick with FreeDOS on it. Mount it on your desktop or laptop machine, then:
  cd /mnt #or wherever it got automounted, look at /proc/mounts
  Remove cruft and BIOSes for other machines.
  unzip /tmp/RYBDWI35.86A.0353.BI.ZIP
• It should give you IFLASH2.EXE and RY0353.bio . Unmount the stick. Plug into the NUC. Boot it. In the very likely case that the boot order is unhelpful, press F10 while booting to get a menu of what to boot.
• Execute IFLASH2.EXE . Choose RY0353.BIO to be flashed. Pray.

Update history:

2015-08-12: BIOS 0350 (2015-08-12)

This is the BIOS that the machine was delivered with, and its date. Not too badly back version.

2016-01-27: BIOS 0353 (2015-12-20)

When received, the machine was updated to this version, the latest.

2018-01-13: BIOS 0368 (2017-12-20)

When the NUC5i5RYH was converted to the Baobei role (Windows), I updated to the latest BIOS. It is believed to have a patch partially mitigating the Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715) exploits.

2018-01-31: BIOS 0367 (2017-09-29)

Oopsie! On two occasions (and another with 0368) the machine appeared to boot normally, but after about 10 minutes of operation Windows froze and BIOS showed an error message. Reverting to 0367 factory defaults (F9 in Setup) was helpful. See below for investigation of this issue.

Lots of users are reporting weird reboots on a variety of Intel CPUs after updating the BIOS to versions with Meltodown mitigation. Intel has withdrawn BIOS 0368; it's no longer on the download site. (And similarly for the NUC6CAYH.) I downloaded and installed BIOS 0367, but the freezeup continued. I tried to downgrade further, but 0366 and earlier are rejected as being incompatible. Forum posters attribute it to a security fix to the Intel Management Engine (that allows SSH into it without a password), and it will not downgrade to a version lacking that fix.

Meltdown/Spectre mitigation and BIOS horkage: Here's a good guide to the present very complicated status of Meltdown/Spectre mitigation: A Clear Guide to Meltdown and Spectre Patches by Jonathan Crowe (latest update 2018-01-29).

After BIOS 0358 was installed, and also after it was reverted to 0357, I had three mysterious crashes. The machine booted normally and was in normal use for about 10 minutes (measured 12 mins, the third time). The machine froze without warning, and the BIOS showed this message:

BIOS has detected unsuccessful POST attempt(s).
Possible causes include recent changes to BIOS
Performance Options or recent hardware change.
Press 'Y' to enter Setup or 'N' to cancel and attempt
to boot with previous settings.

BIOS flashing had no error messages at the time, nor were there any POST error reports. The only thing in the event log was repeated BIOS flashing failures, which I attribute to trying to get various incompatible BIOS versions onto the machine; see above for the reason. The consensus of observations appears to be that when it boots from S5 (power off), it always gets this result after about 10 minutes. If you then take the 'N' choice to reboot, it will continue for a considerable period; the longest so far was 5 hours, and no freezeup occurred.

Google searches yield very little information.

Ben suggested trying to revert to factory defaults. When you re-flash BIOS it sets some but not all settings to default, and perhaps there is something from 0368, that may not even be visible in the BIOS GUI, that is poisonous and that 0367 does not revert. OK, I hit F9 to revert. No freezeup yet: cross fingers…

For the record, here is how BIOS was set, after the third freezeup. Most of these are default values; in fact at this point I didn't change anyhing.

• Main - Event Log - No events. It had been cleared on a previous reboot. The only message so far documents unsuccessful BIOS flashing, and I take these to be rejected attempts to downgrade.
• Performance - Core - Everything is at the default.
  • Host clock frequency: 100MHz
  • Max processor speed: 2.7GHz
  • PEG-DMI Ratio: 100MHz
  • Hyperthread: Off (appears to be the factory default)
  • Turbo: On
  • Active cores: All
  • Single maximum turbo ratio: Off
  • 1 core turbo ratio: 27
  • 2 ore turbo ratio: 25
  • Max non-turbo ratio: 16
  • Processor core voltage mode: Offset Only
  • Processor voltage target: 0.00
  • Processor voltage offset: 0.00
  • Realtime performance tuning: On
• Performance - Uncore
  • Processor Uncore Frequency: 2.4GHz
  • Uncore voltage mode: Offset Ony
  • Ring voltage target: 0.00
  • Ring voltage offset: 0.00
• Power - Primary
  • Low Power enabled (vs. Balanced or Max Performance)
  • Processor VR Efficiency: On
  • Processor VR Faults: On
• Power - Secondary
  • Ready Mode: Off
  • Power Sense: On
  • After power failure: Stay off
  • S3 Indicator: On, solid alternate color (amber)
  • Wake on LAN from S4/S5: Normal boot
  • Wake System from S5: On (except it doesn't wake on LAN from S5)
  • Recurrence: Monthly at xxxx-xx-01 00:00:00
  • Wake from S3 via CIR: On
  • Wake from S4/S5 via CIR: On
  • USB S4/S5 Power: Off (greyed out)
  • PCIe ASPM support: On
  • Native ACPI OS PCIe: On

BIOS Setup

• This should be done after the BIOS update because that resets at least some options to factory defaults.

• Press F2 during booting to get into BIOS setup. It shows Intel NUC for about one second, and likely you have to hit F2 while that screen is showing. The boot menu is on the start page; double click with your mouse on a device to boot from it immediately. (It's also available if you hit F10.)

• Home page: In Boot Order click on Legacy (unless you have a UEFI booter installed, which you won't on your USB flash sticks).

• Tp get off the home page, click on Advanced in the top row and choose one of the traditional categories. In later pages there is a tab bar with categories in the top row.

• Devices: I left everything at the default.

• Cooling: One person suggests turning the fan speed at idle down to about 2200rpm. By default the Fan Control Mode is Balanced but could be changed to Quiet. If I find that the fan is too loud I will mess with this, but the fan seems quiet, so for now I'm leaving it at the default settings.

• Performance: The Turbo clock rates mentioned below in the speed test section are set on this page of the BIOS: 2.7GHz if one core, 2.5GHz if 2 cores. I turned off hyperthread because it's useless on Linux. Other than that, I left everything at the default.

• Security: Totally unlocked. I left these alone. In a public computer lab you will want to set a BIOS password.

• Power: I turned off Max Performance Enabled and turned on Low Power. With none of these enabled, you get a panel of custom settings (and the residual from Low Power looked reasonable). On the Secondary panel, to get out of the weird suspend state bug, it's important to enable Wake on Everything, specifially:

  • Intel Ready Mode: Off (dflt) (requires Windows support)
  • Power Sense: On (dflt)
  • After power failure: Last State (default is Stay Off) -- Needed for MythTV recording role.
  • S3 State Indicator: Solid Alternate Color (dflt is to blink; alternate color is red)
  • Wake on LAN from S4-S5: Power on, normal boot. On Linux you un-hibernate as part of normal booting.
  • Wake system from S5: Off (dflt). If enabled you can set in BIOS a time and repetition frequency to boot the machine.
  • Wake from S3 via CIR (infrared): On (dflt is off).
  • Wake from S4-S5 via CIR: Off (dflt).
  • USB S4-S5 power: Off. The Charging Port stays on. If you won't be able to wake on LAN, you're advised to turn this one on (and don't bump the keyboard or mouse when the machine is supposed to stay off).
  • PCIe ASPM support: On (dflt)
  • Native ACPI OS PCIe Support: Off (dflt)

• Boot: I actually left all these at the default, except selecting Legacy Boot (default is UEFI). In a normal BIOS you can say to boot a USB stick first if there's one plugged in, but in this BIOS when you remove the USB stick it's forgotten. You need to use the boot menu to get it.

• Hit F10 to save and reboot.

Power and Speed Measurements

Memory test using memtest86+ comparing just stick 'B' in the bottom socket, labelled 'A' in the BIOS, vs. both sockets populated.

• CPU clock: 1596MHz (nominal 1.6GHz)
• L1 cache: 32k, 1.60e11 byte/sec (100x CPU clock)
• L2 cache: 256k, 3.47e10 byte/sec
• L3 cache: 3072k, 2.35e10 byte/sec
• Memory: 8Gb (one stick), 8.675e9 byte/sec
• Memory: 16Gb (two sticks), 1.3084e10 byte/sec (1.5x)
• One stick: first pass took about 42 minutes. 2 passes, no errors.
• Two sticks: 3.48 passes taking 10hr 3 mins. No errors. I have the impression that the first pass does fewer repetitions than subsequent passes.
• CPU temperature after 10 hours: 57C. Power: 17W.

Speed test on Jimc's benchmark. Columns in the output:

• CPU speed, kbytes/sec, doing a sha512 sum on concatenated large files preloaded into the buffer cache, using 1 core.
• Same, times the number of cores (2), not counting hyperthread if any.
• Speed in kbytes/sec to read OS files, way beyond the buffer cache.
• Composite score, 0.5*(I/O speed) + 0.375*(sha512) + 0.125*(sha512)*(number of cores).

The test was done first with one memory slot occupied, then with both. It was run 3 times in each condition and the last one is reported. Actually the test is designed to be reasonably immune to buffer cache effects and scores vary only about 3% between repetitions. Numbers are in kbytes/sec.

I'm surprised to find that populating the second socket has no effect at all on speed.

Comparing with my other machines, the NUC with Core i5-5250U@1.6GHz (overclocked to 2.7GHz in Turbo mode) falls between the i7-3517UE @1.7GHz (Diamond) and the i7-3632QM @2.2GHz (Xena), making it the second fastest machine in the house, and clearly the winner in work units per joule.

On another task which does checksums on a big block of memory, where the memory fits in the L3 cache, comparing 1 vs. 2 simultaneous processes, the one core test finished about 8% faster. With one core the CPU governor set a clock rate of 2.7GHz. With both, it used 2.5GHz, 8% less. The nominal clock rate of this CPU is 1.6GHz, but Turbo overclocking can be configured in the BIOS (see above). Likely a much longer running task would warm up the CPU and the clock rate would be turned down more.

Power measurements, in watts, with a Kill-a-Watt meter. Most of these measurements are without the Hauppauge HTV-950q; it adds 2 watts.

• S5 (power off): zero.
• S4 (hibernate): zero.
• S3 (suspend): 3W
• Idle: 9W
• 1 core maxed out: 16W
• 2 cores maxed out: 20W
• GPU maxed out (gaming): Not tested, others report higher power
• Performing MPEG-2: 11W
• While booting: 10 to 15W
• Idle with Hauppauge HTV-950q connected: 11W

Wakeup behavior, indicating what was used to wake the machine:

• S3 (suspend, WOL): 2 secs to sleep, 6 secs to wake
• S4 (hibernate, WOL): 10 secs to sleep, 21 secs to wake
• S5 (power off, WOL): 9 secs to go down, 73 secs to greeter
• Greeter to XFCE desktop: 11 secs (first time), 3 secs (2nd time).
• S3 (suspend, USB): Wakes. This is with a real keyboard, hit shift key.
• S4 (hibernate, USB): Wakes.
• S5 (power off, USB): Wakes. (Probably a safety hazard, suppress in BIOS.)

I have a wireless keyboard which communicates by Bluetooth to a dongle that connects to a USB port and presents the payload as a HID keyboard and mouse, so it can be used before the OS is running. Sometimes it gets into a strange state and sends a lot of keycodes for no reason, making the host wake as soon as it goes into S3 state. But for this sequence of tests the dongle was well behaved and the host could sleep.

Brain Transplants

The present assignment of machines and roles is:

I will move the discs of Iris, Aurora and Piki to get this configuration:

I will do the transplants in this order:

• Kermit stays where it is and records video.

• Find out the NUC's MAC address. Update IPv6 addresses. Install configuration files on all hosts but do not reload DNS or DHCP yet. See detailed procedure below.

• Turn off power in Iris, Aurora, Piki.

• Now reload/restart DNS and DHCP on Jacinth.

• Remove (and label) the three discs: Iris, Aurora, Piki.

• Put Aurora's disc in the Fit-pc Pro. The chassis stays with the TV. It should immediately be operational for viewing programs.

• Oopsie! I misremembered, thinking the Zinos had laptop drives, but they have 3.5in workstation drives. Reverting everything and licking wounds.

• Put Iris' disc in the NUC. It goes with the TV, Fit-pc Pro, and Zbox (Kermit).

• Put Piki's disc in the Zino 400HD. Move it to replace the Zino 400 for audio playback.

• Zino 400 chassis goes to storage.

• Setup and checkout activities on the NUC (now Iris), without time pressure.

• When the NUC is recording and playing back correctly, switch the Fit-pc Pro (Aurora) to retrieve shows from Iris (formerly retrieved from Kermit).

• Move the Fit-pc Pro (Aurora) to serve the upstairs TV.

• Shut off Kermit's video recording role. Move it upstairs for audio playback.

• Move the Zino 400HD (Piki) to the hot spare niche.

Here are details of the procedure to swap discs and IPv6 addresses.

• Chicken and egg: To find out the NUC's MAC address, you have to boot the rescue system. But when booting, linuxrc demands that the installation media be available, and I don't have an 8Gb or bigger flash memory stick. Therefore the rescue system has to be booted across the net. But Diamond isn't going to cough up the installation system until the NUC's MAC address is registered in the firewall.

  Good news: the MAC address is on a sticker on the bottom of the NUC.

• Create the NUC's IPv6 address from the MAC address. Soon this will refer to Iris.

• Now is a good time to run a short memory diagnostic on the NUC. [Done, no errors.] Later I will want to run it overnight.

• On Jacinth, adjust the relation between names and addresses in these files. Also the descriptive comments. Do not reload DNS yet.

  • /var/lib/named/master/ cft.zone cft0.rev6 (Advance the serno.) (Jacinth only.)
  • /etc/ethers (all hosts)
  • /etc/firewallJ.d/trusted-adr.fw (all hosts)
  • /etc/dhcpd.conf (Jacinth only)
  • /etc/hosts but leave it as /etc/hosts.new (all hosts)
  • /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules on Iris, Aurora, Piki.

• On all hosts, install /etc/ethers /etc/firewallJ.d/trusted-adr.fw /etc/hosts.new .

• On all hosts, reload the firewall (to let in the NUC).

• First get a session on each of (old) Iris, Aurora, Piki.

• On all hosts, mv /etc/hosts.new /etc/hosts

• Power off Iris, Aurora, Piki using the session already started.

• Reload DNS on Jacinth. Restart DHCP on Jacinth. ldapsync -v on Jacinth. sync_jump on Diamond.

• Move the discs to the new chassis. Move each chassis to its new location and connect peripherals, display, etc.

• Power on the machines.

• Check that everything is working (checkout.sh).

Revised brain transplant plan:

Zino 400HD

• Starts as Aurora, with 3.5in drive.
• Copy all of /home and particular files in /etc to the NUC (250Gb). Do a giant diff to identify them.
• Similarly copy identifying files from Zino 400 (Piki).
• The 400HD, which is now an ersatz Piki, stays off the net until the last step.

NUC5i5RYH

Initially the NUC was going to receive directly the disc out of Iris, but that plan had to be revised. I resurrected a 250Gb laptop drive and called it Orion.

• Starts as Orion with 250Gb laptop drive.
• Newly install OpenSuSE-42.1 on this drive. Check that everything is working.
• Receive identifying files and payload (/home) from Zino 400HD. That turns it into Aurora.
• IP address transition for Aurora on NUC.
• Install MythTV packages (audit-pkgs -i).
• Test that it can play content, using Mythmote as the control. We know that the IR keycodes on Aurora are wacked.
• Exchange discs with the FitPC Pro. Now it's really Iris.
• IP address transition for Iris on NUC, also Aurora on FitPC Pro.
• Test that the NUC (as Iris) can play content and that the IR works.

Issues with NUC5i5RYH as Iris:

• It looks like my hacked /etc/rc_keymaps/rc_mce is being used. But some of the keys on the remote control are wearing out and it took some work to get confidence that they were at fault for unreliable signalling.
• It uses the Intel X-Windows driver, but with a resolution of 1280x1024@60Hz, not 1920x1080px. This is on what it calls output HDMI2, using the mini Display Port to HDMI adapter. Later I obtained a mini HDMI to standard HDMI adapter, but after the X-server was restarted (several times), the resolution stayed at 1280x1024px. When I rebooted the machine, it got the correct 1920x1080px. This says that there is something persistent in the integrated Intel HD Graphics 6000 GPU.
• Performing 1080p (at 1280x1024, not a fair test): No dropped frames. It uses only 12% CPU, 88% idle. Both cores share the work about equally. This is with the ffmpeg codec.
• No sound over HDMI, actually mini Display Port to HDMI adapter. Once the mini HDMI to HDMI adapter arrived, the sound worked.
• aplay -D hw:1,0 $snd -- If you plug phones into the NUC's jack, the sound is playing. But I can't figure out how to get the TV to play the sound on its 3.5mm input. hw:0,3 is S/PDIF over HDMI which also doesn't play (via mini Display Port).

FitPC Pro

• Starts as Iris with 1Tb laptop drive. Don't alter this disc.
• Exchange discs with the NUC.
• IP address transition for Aurora on FitPC Pro, also Iris on NUC.
• Test that it can play content, using Mythmote as the control. Later we'll unscramble the IR keycodes.

Issues with FitPC Pro as Aurora:

• The lightdm-webkit control files didn't get copied: no auto login. [Fixed.]
• Mythfrontend is not installed. [Fixed.]
• So much KDE stuff! Did I ask for k3b? Yes. [Removed.]

Zino 400

• Starts as Piki with 3.5in drive.
• Copy identifying files to Zino 400HD.
• Piki stays operational until Aurora is on the FitPC Pro.
• Then, convert this machine to be Orion.
• IP address transition for Orion on Zino 400.
• Later, power off the Zino 400. Wipe disc. Send to storage.

Zino 400HD again

• IP address transition for Piki on Zino 400HD.
• Bring up Zino 400HD.
• Test if it can play audio.
• Later, when Kermit takes over the audio role, it will be moved to the hot spare niche.

Issues with Zino 400HD as Piki:

• It has the Grivet software, but does not play audio. Wrong output device? No, the speaker was turned down to zero.
• It tries to start display-manager.service, waits 2 mins, dies. Missing background image. [Fixed.]

Zbox AD03BR

• Starts as Kermit with laptop drive. Not going to change identity or disc.
• When Iris (NUC) is recording and performing reliably, shut off recording on Kermit and switch Aurora to fetch from Iris.
• Move it to the audio playback niche again.

Installing OpenSuSE 42.1

Initially I intended to do a bunch of brain transplants, and the NUC5i5RYH would never need a fresh installation of the operating system. However it turned out that I needed to set up a laptop drive, in the NUC, that would eventually host Aurora and which would be transplanted into the Fit-PC Pro.

• Network installation using the USB flash storage install/rescue system. This time it worked like a charm.
• While registering the new machine with the firewall, DNS, etc., run memtest. 2 passes, about 45 minutes each.
• Boot the installer. Pick New Installation. For SuSE-13.1 and a new installation you couldn't add our update repo. For SuSE-42.1 I believe I could have done so, but I didn't. Using the update repo would have headed off a problem in post_jump.
• Timezone US/Pacific (clock on UTC).
• Desktop: Other, Minimal X-Windows or XFCE Desktop. Post_jump will install additional Gnome stuff later.
• Partitions: Total size 250Gb.
  • 1. 18.4Gb ext4 (actually 19.3Gb): root (bootable).
  • 2. 25.8Gb swap
  • 3. 9.1Gb ext4 (actually 9.7Gb): /home
  • 4. 195Gb (rest): extended partition
  • 5. 195Gb ext4: /s1
• Started SuSE installation: took about 20 mins.
• Post_jump problems:
  • During package removal or upgrade, something got seriously version skewed, and post_jump could not continue. I never found out what package was the culprit. Better to have initially installed the current versions from the upgrade repo. When I re-ran post_jump from the beginning, it finished with no (major) problems.
  • But it botched installation of the Kerberos host key; the destination directory was missing. I re-ran krb-util by hand and it was OK. Very strange.

For MythTV, create a directory /s1/video and a link to it from /video. [Done]

USB Bus Structure on NUC5i5RYH

Unlike on the Fit-PC Pro and LP, the NUC has only one USB bus and all of the ports connect to it. This bus is provided with a XHCI (USB-3.0) and a EHCI (USB-2.0) controller.