• Users’ Windows PCs backing up automatically to their respective folder on the network
• These backups being automatically rsync’d with an external disk, for a true backup
• Reports on the status of the machine being made available to me at regular intervals

The first is turning out to be the most difficult. Initially I wanted to write a batch script that handled this for me and then configure it to run once a week using Task Scheduler in Windows. However, there are three different versions of Windows for me to contend with out of my five users, (XP, Vista, 7), so it wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be, with Vista and 7 including “Robocopy” out of the box, and XP not. However, we all know the most straightforward solution isn’t always the best one. Even with Robocopy, you cannot do incremental/differential file copies. You can coarsely say “all files changed after some date”, but it still copies everything in full.

Enter FTPSync, a nice little FTP tool which has a built-in differencing algorithm and allows full, incremental and differential backups. Its configuration is somewhat obscure, but nothing too difficult to understand with the help of their online documentation (which as it always happens, was actually down the first time I wanted to access it). After some initial tests on a small dataset, I think it will be most suitable for my purposes, for two reasons: (a) incremental/differential backups, saving time, and (b) it does this over FTP, which is the most CPU-efficient protocol for my underpowered file server.

Setting up the user home directories was pretty easy: just enable the [homes] share in your Samba configuration, and you’re away. Mine are actually redirected via symlinks to another disk, so you also have to add “symlinks = yes” to the [global] section of your config, or your home directories won’t appear as intended. The rsync configuration was also pretty straightforward, but I’ll include my backup script here for your reference:

There’s actually a lot of junk at the start of the script which I haven’t cleaned out yet (since changing from an rsync over SSH approach), but the important part, the part that does all the work, is the rsync call on line 28. The simple if construction checks the size of the data to be backed up, and then proceeds if below 200Gb, otherwise does nothing. The result of the script is e-mailed to me when it finishes. Also, I have created a little script which runs every now and then to collect the temperature of the hard disks, a df output or two, and some other info, which is also e-mailed to me periodically, just to keep an eye on things.

There is a version of the above script for each of the five users on my system, and they are all executed using roots cron daemon. As noted in the script, the rsync.pwd file must be owned by root for this to work.

1. Left-click the icon and select ‘Preferences’; click the checkbox next to ‘Start applet on session login’ and close the dialogue.
2. Next, left-click the icon and select ‘Configure local sound server’; click the ‘Network Server’ tab and check the boxes next to ‘Enable network access to local sound devices’ and then ‘Don’t require authentication’. This allows applications to stream audio data direct to PulseAudio instead of through PulseAudio’s implementation of the ALSA API. This is necessary for all applications that support talking directly to PulseAudio.

Next, you’ll want to open the Volume Control from the tray icon menu and select your output device on the Configuration tab. PulseAudio should have enumerated all of the available combinations on your system, so choose the option you want. If you’re using optical output to your A/V receiver or television, choose digital, SPDIF or IEC958.

Setting up mpd for use with PulseAudio is straightforward. Open your /etc/mpd.conf file and comment out all the configuration related to alsa, then scroll down a bit and you should see a commented-out section related to PulseAudio. Make your config look like the below, and restart mpd.

# An example of an ALSA output:
#
#audio_output {
# type "alsa"
# name "My ALSA Device"
# device "hw:0,1" # optional
# format "44100:16:2" # optional
# mixer_device "default" # optional
# mixer_control "PCM" # optional
# mixer_index "0" # optional
#}
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "My Pulse Output"
# server "remote_server" # optional
# sink "remote_server_sink" # optional
}

Next, you’ll need to setup MythTV. This is pretty straightforward, all I did was go through the General settings to the audio options menu and set the following options:

Update! MythTV trunk supports PulseAudio, so all you need to do is select ‘PulseAudio:default’ as the audio output device.

• Output:ALSA:plughw:0,1 (0,1 being the card id, device id key, obtainable through the command ‘aplay -l’; you may have something different in your setup but you can freely edit this text field for the correct device)
• Passthrough output device: Default
• Max audio channels: Stereo
• Upmix: passive
• Enable AC3 to SPDIF passthrough: no (force AC3 decoding by MythTV if your receiver can’t do it)
• Enable DTS to SPDIF passthrough: yes (pass Dolby/DTS to your receiver, for DVDs)

And that’s it! All done. You should now have mpd and MythTV routable through PulseAudio which allows you to make use of the excellent projectM audio visualisation suite (basically an implementation of Milkdrop in OpenGL for Linux). Excellent for parties!

A note: This does actually output PCM 44.1Khz correctly. I was previously routing my audio through HDMI cable to the television, then from the television to the receiver. The TV was outputing a 48Khz signal; direct from the computer via optical, it’s a sweet 44.1Khz. Nice!

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

So, on the back of my previous posts, I have finally come to some kind of a conclusion regarding my plans for an HTPC and media centre solution.

The problem previously was that I didn’t have a home theatre to plug any HTPC I built into. However, there are some deals going down at the moment that I am finding too hard to pass up. Not only that, but I feel as though I am overwhelmingly dependent upon my computer for entertainment, which is fine for me, but doesn’t accommodate my housemates and friends very well in a social context. Four things have conspired to make me consider this purchasing spree:

• Harvey Norman currently has a 23-month no repayment deal going
• Sharp are offering an XBox 360 Elite and four games with the purchase of their televisions
• My lounge is rarely used because I find I have nothing to do there
• With a HTPC, I will be able to push all of my computer geekery outside of the computer room onto other people! Muhahaha!

Me being me of course, I would not be satisfied by spending money unwisely. In my eyes, spending unwisely also includes spending “just enough” to get something “good enough” – if I’m going to outlay a large sum of money on something, I might as well make sure it does exactly what I need, how I want it to, even if that means outlaying an even larger sum than what I could “get away with”. As the old saying goes, if you aren’t going to do something properly, you might as well not do it at all.

The components I have chosen are:

• Television: Sharp LC46D77X; a standard-fare 46″ LCD television. I don’t know if having an RS-232 port is standard for LCDs, but this one has one, which is important to me because it will allow me to control the television through my HTPC.
• Games: By redemption (and payment of a small postage fee), from Sharp I will receive an XBox 360 Elite with four games. I would never spend money on an XBox or PS3 if I could get away with it, and in this case although I am indirectly supporting Microsoft, I figure Sharp has already bought the consoles and I am not actually contributing anything directly to Microsoft. In any case, a home theatre without a social gaming aspect isn’t much of a home theatre at all. In the end, I can just sell it if I don’t want it.
• BluRay: I have a few options here, but all I really want is something that reads the disc and throws the data out a HDMI cable to my A/V receiver. The cheapest option should suffice.
• Home Theatre Speakers: Yamaha YHT-692AU or similar. It has 4 HDMI inputs, 2 optical inputs, 2 co-axial audio inputs, component and standard RCA. Everything I’ll need.
• HTPC: Will cost about $800 and be based on an Intel platform; either a dual-core Pentium or Atom.

I have two options here. Basing the system on a mini-ITX Intel/nVidia ION platform will ensure very low power usage, but also ensure a very limited upgrade path. The system is designed with one purpose in mind, so the lack of an upgrade path may not be a problem. However, it isn’t much cheaper than basing the system on a standard ATX mainboard with a dual-core Pentium and discrete nVidia graphics card. It will have an upgrade path however as mentioned this may not be necessary, but the option existing is comforting.

The two systems I’ve mocked up are as follows:

Some notes: the hard disk is meant to replace the hard disk in my desktop system which is a Western Digital Green Power 750Gb. I bought the Green Power because it was cheaper without fully realizing the difference in performance between the two which is substantial. Also, I already have a USB HDTV dongle so I may only need to buy one extra in case watching one channel while recording another becomes a necessity.

So, as you can see I nearly have everything worked out. My plan is to have everything plug via HDMI and optical cable into the Yamaha receiver and make use of the excellent Logitech Harmony 525 multifunction remote to control everything. Although it probably won’t be necessary to do so with the remote, I will still be able to use an RS232 serial cable from the computer to control the television. I might end up setting that up just for coolness factor. Perhaps it will allow me to fine-tune control of the television.

So, these are my plans. Any thoughts, opinions, input?

Specifically, Dell and Asus.

Why? Dell, because their computer systems are nearly always Linux compatible from top to bottom. My Dell XPS M1330 laptop is a perfect example; everything works out of the box with Ubuntu Linux (even the media keys!). The same goes for most of their other models. Dell typically uses quality hardware components which aren’t manufactured by obscure impersonators. Also, apparently they’re really interested in what their customers have to say.

Why Asus? I haven’t ever really thought much of Asus in the past. I used to think their products were overpriced and under-performing. Maybe I was right five years ago, but things change. Today, I have many Asus products which I find to be of excellent quality and well worth the associated price premium over similar products. My desktop machine is based on an Asus motherboard; it has more bells and whistles than I will probably ever use, but the knowledge I can in future is nice. Not only that, but the Asus uses superior power delivery circuitry than most other motherboards.

My sound card is an Asus sound card; this is great. For a long time, Creative were the only company making sound cards worth buying. Consequently, they got lazy and barely innovated. Their product updates brought little improvement, and their support was atrocious. Knowing they were the only vendor worth giving money, they pretty much stopped caring. If you’ve ever tried to search for drivers for a Creative sound card on the internet, you’ll know what I mean.

So, I was glad to not buy a Creative product. The Asus Xonar DX in my desktop system is arguably the best sound card for its price, and it works well with my Alessandro MS-1 headphones. Not the best solution for gaming, but I don’t care too much – I prefer the clarity, richness and size of the soundscape that this combination gives me in music.

However, recently, I decided that it was rather ridiculous for me to turn on my desktop machine just to listen to music while working on my laptop. (I am a bit of an audiophile – no, the inbuilt sound in my laptop is nice and all, but not really good enough for me.) So, I went ahead and bought myself a shiny new toy, also Asus: the Xonar U1. Essentially, a USB version of the Xonar DX. I did a little research beforehand to ensure it would work in Linux – thankfully, it does. As it uses similar hardware to the other products in the Xonar range, a driver was already available. (No thanks to Asus for this of course – they’re not that good). Currently the hardware volume control of the device doesn’t appear to work, nor does digital-out at present, but I don’t really use either, so I am not worried. I care more about the quality of the output, which is great for a $63 piece of equipment.

So, I plugged it in, configured my sound devices through the PulseAudio configurator, and now I’m happily enjoying high-quality music through my laptop just as I would my desktop! This also eliminates the need for me to remote desktop into my desktop to change the song, which is another story of horribleness courtesy of Microsoft arbitrarily defining ‘Home’ versions of Vista as being incapable of supporting remote desktop technology (I use VNC, it is a pain as it has to be started in user mode, it is blocked by the kernel due to “security reasons” if I try to run the service).

Anyway, this is pretty much a post inspired by my being chuffed at succeeding in having things the way I want them. At the end of the day, that’s what life is all about, right?

So, it was decided that the cheapest option would be the best option: enter the Asus eeeBox. The B202 version can be had for only $299 AUD from select stores in Australia. Let me tell you now that this is a ridiculous price.

The system came packaged in good quality cardboard with nice graphics on it. The package included a keyboard and 3-button scroll mouse, a standard dipole aerial for the wireless adaptor, a DVI->VGA adapter for the DVI-only output, and a mounting bracket so the system could be mounted to the back of an LCD (or even to any mountable smooth surface).

The build quality of the system itself is quite good. It feels solid and well-built. The plastics used are mid-range in quality, and should last a while. My only gripe with the design of the unit is the small door on the front which I imagine could be easily accidentally broken off. This doesn’t really matter as it does not affect the functionality at all, but aesthetically the door makes the system look very tidy.

And I haven’t even talked about the hardware specs yet! The B202 version of the eeeBox comes with an Intel Atom 1.6Ghz CPU, 1024Mb of DDRII memory at 533Mhz, an 80GB 5400RPM SATAII hard disk, Gigabit ethernet, 802.11b/g wireless, four USB ports, DVI-out, and an SD/MMC card reader built in. Did I mention the ongoing benefits? It draws maxium of about 20W. A standard light bulb draws 60W. Yeah, this computer system costs less to run than a lightbulb does.

All for, once again: $299 AUD. Impressive.

I jimmy’d myself up a USB installation media and once I figured out how to change the boot order in the BIOS (I’m a man! I don’t read manauls!) it booted just fine into the Ubuntu 8.10 desktop install. (Sidenote: I’ve only previously booted off LiveCDs which were actually on CD media, and I have to say, if you have the option of USB booting: DO IT. It’s incredibly fast and makes the Live environment actually usable as a proper temporary system!)

I installed Ubuntu and rebooted. No dramas. Then I set up the wireless and that worked first try.

I browsed on over to apple.com/trailers and clicked on a 720p movie trailer. Ubuntu/Firefox told me it needed to install additional software to continue. I did so, restarted Firefox, and once the page loaded up the 720p Apple trailer started playing!

I simply couldn’t believe my eyes: a. that this $299 little computer, the size of two DVD cases, was playing back 720p HD content over the ‘net/wireless with no stutter and no dropped frames, and b. that it was doing so using a freely available operating system that took me literally 10 minutes to install.

Absolutely incredible!

I highly recommend the eeeBox and Ubuntu combination to anyone who’s responsibility is to “fix computers for the family” — you simply can’t go past the price tag, ease of installation and use.

I’m a pretty big open-source advocate and follow the trends quite closely, but I had no idea things had come this far. Consider me blown away.

I’m considering one for myself now. Combined with a couple of USB hard disks (with mdadm RAID and LVM) and a USB TV adaptor, it’d make a perfect low-power media centre + network data storage device.

If I take a letter, lock it in a safe, hide the safe somewhere in New York, then tell you to read the letter, that’s not security. That’s obscurity. On the other hand, if I take a letter and lock it in a safe, and then give you the safe along with the design specifications of the safe and a hundred identical safes with their combinations so that you and the world’s best safecrackers can study the locking mechanism – and you still can’t open the safe and read the letter – that’s security.

It’s an interesting analogy that non-technical people can understand. The problem of course lies with those who are ‘semi-technical’ – those that know what source code looks like, but do not understand what can be done with it. They think they have some knowledge when in reality they do not. The problem is: how do you convince these people that they do not know enough to make comment, without offending them (especially if they are a client of yours)?

The answer is simple: make sure you have securely configured their F/LOSS systems and invite them to have a penetration test carried out.

Post inspired by/stolen from Slashdot.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

Introduction

As I am now living in my own place with people of my generation who understand my desire to have “everything now” (as most other late Generation X-ers and early Generation Y-ers will understand), I have decided that it is time to build myself a media centre for use in the lounge/common room.

The popularity of digital media management solutions has steadily risen over the past few years. Solutions based around commodity PC hardware and open-source operating systems have been around since 2002 at least, with commercial options such as TiVo being available for a few years beforehand.

Although TiVo has been available in America and surrounding countries for nearly 10 years now, it has only recently become avilable in countries such as Australia, Taiwan etc more recently. Thus contributing to the popularisation (amongst geeks at least) of free/open-source solutions such as the aforementioned MythTV.

Software

It is this software system, on top of my as always favourite Linux operating system that I will build my media centre solution. I have decided that using Arch will be ideal for a few reasons:

1. it’s fast. With my older hardware, this is important, especially when considering playback of HD content
2. I know how to use it.
3. I prefer some “under the hood” access – configuring everything from scratch, for me, is not a chore. I prefer it to having everything set to defaults like with Ubuntu/Mythbuntu. With either of those distributions, I’d end up changing all the defaults anyway.

Hardware

My hardware of choice is my ex-gaming PC, a veteran system by today’s standards which is over four years old now!

• AMD Athlon64 3400+ (2400Mhz)
• DFI LANParty UT nForce 250GB
• 2x512Mb Corsair Dual-Channel RAM
• Albatron nVidia GeForce 6800GT 256Mb
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

Storage

Currently the system has about 480GB of storage spread across three seperate hard drives (the joys of incremental upgrades). However, due to the planned dual-role of this computer as media centre and secure backup/storage system, I will be buying some new drives and setting up a simple software RAID system of SATA disks. With the ridiculous cost of hard disk storage solutions these days, where off-the-shelf 1TB drives command an approximate cost of 16 cents per gigabyte, there will be no shortage of disk space.

For reasons of performance and reliability I will buy at least two identical drives (probably a pair of Western Digital 7200RPM ‘Green Power’ drives) and place them in a RAID1 configuration. Whether I will use the onboard RAID capabilities of the system board or an implementation in software (mdadm) is largely irrelevant in terms of performance as both rely on the CPU to perform RAID-related calculations. However, using the software solution will abstract the RAID functions from the hardware, which will eliminate the single point of failure. If the motherboard were to be replaced, I would effectively lose my RAID system, and all data with it. The underlying hardware is irrelevant in this scenario when using software RAID.

Video Capture

Finding the right video capture card isn’t going to be as easy as the rest of the hardware. While there is a lot of information (MythTV hardware wiki, OCAU MythTV Wiki) available about which are the best cards to buy, it is a matter of matching the exact cards which are known as fully working to those actually available for purchase.

For example, the Leadtek DTV-2000H is a well-rounded card which offers the features I require. However, there are two different revisions available, the ‘I’ revision and the ‘J’ revision. The former works flawlessly and the latter has intermittent problems and requires a lot more tweaking to get it to play nicely. Both cards use the same highly recommended chipset (Connextant 2388x) but apparently are different enough to cause problems (see the MythTV wiki entry for this card). This makes my choice a very difficult one as retailers generally aren’t too happy about having customers open boxes and inspect hardware version numbers prior to a purchase being made.

Remote Control

The only other hardware consideration I have is what remote control to use. Some of the available video capture cards come with their own, or I may buy another. It is an incidental cost in the grand scheme of things but adds so much functionality to the system. I do not want to have a keyboard and mouse hanging around in my loungeroom if I can avoid it, and indeed, I can. More to the point, though, a remote control with familiar buttons makes the system much more accessible to the non-technical people who will be using the system, and that increases the chances it’ll be used.

Conclusion

As this is only part one of my upcoming series of posts on the matter, you will have to wait a week or two until I’ve properly researched my hardware choices, made my purchases and begun the build. Rest assured though, I’ll do a full write-up!

• The Hardware

  The hardware I chose to use was rather limited in performance, which I think illustrates the efficiency of the software and solution which I designed. Components were as follows:

  • CPU: Pentium II 300Mhz
  • RAM: 384Mb SDRAM
  • Motherboard: Intel i440BX-based
  • Video: S3 Virge DX/3D
  • Storage: 4Gb, 5400RPM ATA HDD
  • Sound: Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

  Obviously, I chose the software based on the known limitations of this hardware. Luckily I had a spare SoundBlaster Live! card, because I don’t think the system would’ve been able to reliably handle the music playback and the overheads of the user interface without it. Of course, whatever hardware you plan on using will probably be much faster. I really did pull this box right out of the stone age.

• The Operating System

  The operating system I chose in order to optimise performance was of course my favourite Linux operating system: Arch Linux. With the kernel, modules and all packages being i686-optimized, it was a good starting point for a “from scratch” jukebox system. More importantly though is that after installation of the base system, I had a basic, but fully working, command line Linux system at my disposal. This meant there were no unnecessary startup services, configurations and other settings which would have been useless, redundant or otherwise a hinderence to performance on this slow system.

• The Desktop Environment

  I chose to install XFCE as the desktop environment because it is the most lightweight of the ‘fully-featured’ environments. I would have liked to use an even lighter option, but of all the specialty and niche options available, I had never used any before, and this build was to be completed in a few hours. So, I chose XFCE which I found behaved no differently to GNOME, but was still relatively responsive despite limited system resources.

  To make the GUI look decent, I had to install a few additional packages that are not explicit dependencies of XFCE. They are listed below.

  • ttf-ms-fonts – the easiest way to make websites look nice is by installing this font package
  • midori – a lightweight, Webkit based browser for GTK+ environments. I chose this over Firefox due to the AJAX-heavy nature of the relaxx player. Webkit is supposedly superior in performance compared to alternatives

• The Webserver

  Now, you may be wondering why, with such a limited system, I was bothering with so many layers of abstraction between music, player and control. The reason is that none of the music playing applications I investigated (and there were quite a few) offered any functionality near that of a simple party jukebox. So, I had to use a web-based front end for mpd called relaxx, both of which I’ll talk about soon.

  The webserver of choice is lighttpd; a light weight simple web server, with all the features (and a lot more) required for what I had in mind.

• The Music Daemon

  Simply put: mpd. Or, Music Player Daemon, as it is less commonly known. I chose this system for multiple reasons: first and foremost, its awesome efficiency. With my 80Gb music collection catalogued and at my immediate disposal, mpd uses approximately three megabytes of system memory. Yes, you read that correctly: three. megabytes. If I go ahead and do something silly like, say, add my entire music collection into a single playlist, that number jumps to a staggering (!!!) eight megabytes. Yeah, I know. It’s ridiculous.

  Secondly, due to the daemon nature of mpd, you can use any frontend you like. You can use a text-based terminal application, you can use a GTK+, Qt or other, or you can use a web-based application, like relaxx player.

• The Music Frontend

  This is the party piece — the piece of the system that everyone gets to see. I chose relaxx player because it had some of the functionality that provides jukebox-like behaviour. Well, kind of. It essentially only had one major feature that made it stand out from a variety of other mpd front-ends: multi-user capability. Essentially, you could lock down certain features of the interface for anonymous users, and require a login for those functions. So, essentially that meant I could specify that anonymous users were only allowed to add songs to the playlist and press play. Meaning you had to log in to delete tracks, stop, pause or rewind, etc.

  The installation of relaxx was straightforward, but I had to install a few extra packages under Arch to make it work properly:

  • Arch wiki: Getting relaxx to work with Arch

  This was the only part of the system which didn’t quite work out so well. Its functionality was great, but due to the fact that it’s programmed entirely in AJAX, the old Pentium II powering the computer couldn’t quite keep up. It was slow to respond and not very nice to use, but it was usable. The music itself never skipped a beat (literally), but the performance of this frontend left something to be desired.

A few years ago they released the Steam platform: it’s essentially a content distribution system tailored for selling games direct from the creators to the public. Initially there were problems with bandwidth availability and some other issues, but Valve worked dilligently to solve them. Today, Steam is not just a game-selling platform, it also delivers news, comics, movies and other types of entertaiment media directly to consumers from the publishers. It cuts out a few middle-men and makes software cheaper to buy, which is only a good thing.

Again, Valve may be showing themselves to be forward-thinking. Apparently they’ve been hiring Linux software developers to port Windows games to Linux.

Also, a few other big-name games that are coming to Steam soon have been noted as making available a Linux-compatible version. Namely, the Penny Arcade comic game, On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Penny Arcade has been closely affiliated with Valve since a few years ago when the comic was featured on the main page of Sources’ Steam application; obviously, the new Penny Arcade game is going to be distributed by Steam.

More notoriously, the upcoming Postal III is also being released on Steam, and will also have a Linux client, according to an interview conducted with Vince Desi, CEO of Running With Scissors, the development company behind the Postal series of games.

The piece de resistance however is this gem which states quite clearly

Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.

What can we make of that?

We can only hope these rumours, which are apparently bolstered by facts, come to light as truths. I personally only play games available on the Steam platform, and if I could chuck away my Windows installation altogether, it’d be most welcome!

Head over to this thread on the Phoronix forums for the discussion that started it all.

Edit: Jump to this comment for an alternative way to achieve this.

This is rather simple to achieve, as fortunately the Linux nVidia driver retains a mechanism to read Windows registry values. How do you pass Windows registry values to the nVidia Linux driver? I’m glad you asked! Just like this:

That’s the relevant excerpt from my xorg.conf; it’s simply a matter of defining the “RegistryDword” option under the Device section, and passing in the appropriate arguments. In this case, we want to tell PowerMizerLevel to be a certain value.

You can copy and paste the above code, but you must be mindful of one thing: change the ‘x’ character above to an actual “x” – WordPress is doing some funky auto-formatting to change the character from a regular letter ‘x’ to a multiplication symbol as it lies between two numerals. After you’ve changed it, restart X, start up Compiz-Fusion or another 3D app, and keep a watch on the performance level in the nVidia utility. It doesn’t change!