[Off-Topic] New old user SOLVED

[JJJ]

In 2005 I retired and decided to work on a master's degree, so I bought a new laptop, determined to put Linux on it. A local Linux group held monthly fix-up meetings with a mix of gurus and newbies. I took my laptop with me and we tried installing various distros, but my laptop could do 1920x1080, and everything we tried came up VGA. Eventually one of the gurus said 'there's this new distro, but no one knows anything about it; it's called 'Ubuntu.' He produced a live CD of Breezy Badger and we booted it (yeah, I'm kind of old), and I sat staring at a 1920x1080 screen. In that moment Shuttleworth made another sale. Except for a few years when I ventured into Fedora, I've stuck with Ubuntu, but lately Canonical has been going into Snap and a lot of other things that I'm not sure I'm ready for. A friend convinced me that I really needed to try Bookworm, so I installed it in VirtualBox on Xubuntu 22.04.3 host. I've spent the last several days experimenting to be sure that all the applications that I need are available, and I'm currently at about 80%. I should add that I'm really liking Bookworm a lot (Xfce edition), and I'm hoping that it will soon be time to make a transition.

Burt first, I have a question that I hope someone can give me some suggestions on. My home is thoroughly wired for ethernet, and on this network I have a Silicondust HDHomeRun television tuner. On my Ubuntu machines I have installed the HDHomeRun Config GUI (from the repositories), and it works perfectly. It's also in the Debian repositories, and I installed it, but it won't launch, producing only a error message that it can't find the executable. A quick check revealed part of the problem: Installing it (with Debian's Synaptic) failed to produce the .desktop file. Of course, the host machine has the .desktop file, so a little adroit copy and paste action and I had the hdhr.desktop file in Debian's /usr/share/applications folder. And after that it finally appeared in the panel launch menu. But it still won't launch, with the same error message.

I'm writing this in the Debian guest with Brave browser, so I can guarantee that Debian sees the network just fine, including the internet. In fact, I can ping the tuner, no problem. But if I do '/usr/bin/hdhomerun_config discover' the result is 'no devices found.' Doing that same command from the Ubuntu machines results in the tuner's ID number.

I could use some suggestions. And apologies for my lengthy introduction.

[sunrat]

Welcome to Debian!
I don't use VBox any more as I prefer KVM/QEMU with virt-manager. One thought though - do you have Guest Additions installed in Debian?

[JJJ]

Yes I do, virtualbox-guest-additions-iso, 7.0.6-2, installed from the repositories. I installed it in the hopes that it would make the shared folders work, but it didn't help. Guest additions are also installed in the host, which has VirtualBox 7.0 from Oracle.

[sunrat]

Yes I do, virtualbox-guest-additions-iso, 7.0.6-2, installed from the repositories. I installed it in the hopes that it would make the shared folders work, but it didn't help. Guest additions are also installed in the host, which has VirtualBox 7.0 from Oracle.

You have to mount the iso and run the guest additions installer from there iirc. Just installing the package will only put the iso on the system, and you need exactly the same version of guest additions as the VBox install IIRC. Again though, my memory of VBox is hazy.
Have you considered making space for a dual boot install? 20GB is ample and hardware is more likely to work in a proper install rather than dealing with the vagaries of virtual machines.

[JJJ]

You have to mount the iso and run the guest additions installer from there iirc. Just installing the package will only put the iso on the system, and you need exactly the same version of guest additions as the VBox install IIRC. Again though, my memory of VBox is hazy.
Have you considered making space for a dual boot install? 20GB is ample and hardware is more likely to work in a proper install rather than dealing with the vagaries of virtual machines.

Thanks for the points about getting shared folders to work, and a week ago I would have been eager to follow through, but then I discovered that with Firefox or Brave I can log into either of my 32TB NAS storage devices, both sitting across the room from me, so I can just use them as intermediaries to get files into the Debian 12 machine. The machine is a temporary thing anyway. I set it up just to experiment to see if I can get everything installed that I need. If it works out as I think it will I will buy a 2TB M.2 drive to place in an unused slot in the computer, then do a regular install, leaving the Ubuntu / and /home partitions to mount on the new Debian installation in case I left something behind.

At the moment one hangup on my grand scheme is not being able to access my network TV tuner. I'm not a big fan of TV, but BBC news is broadcast over the air here at 2pm every day, and it's nice to hear what people on the other side of the world are thinking. The utility works fine on all flavors of Ubuntu, so it surprised me when it didn't work in Debian 12. Surely there is a simple incantation I can cast to make it happen.

[JJJ]

Today I fiddled with the HDHomeRun. The first thing I did was to delete the installation that I had made with Synaptic on Debian, and then installed a .deb file that I downloaded from Oracle, using gDebi. And this time the installation created a .desktop file, so it appeared in the launch menus. Sadly, it still won't launch, claiming that it can't find the tuner.

In Brave on Debian I found a firmware update file, and for Linux a command to install it:

hdhomerun_config <ID> upgrade hdhomerun3_atsc_firmware_20230505.bin

I had previously discovered that on my Ubuntu machines I can use 'hdhomerun-config discover' to find the tuner, which returns its model number and ID, but on Debian the command just gives 'nothing found.' However, I can ping the tuner from Debian, so I tried just entering its IP address in the URL bar, and got a lovely page with a window in the middle with lines giving the model number, ID, and firmware version. The firmware version was from 2017, and I had several times tried unsuccessfully to update it so, still in Debian I did the command, replacing the ID with the IP address, giving me: 'hdhomerun_config 192.168.1.112 upgrade /home/jjj/Software/hdhomerun3_atsc_firmware_20230505.bin.' The command paused a moment, then said 'updating firmware ... finished.' Then I tried to launch the hdconfig-gui, but it still couldn't find the tuner. I went back to Ubuntu, re-launched the config GUI, and it said the firmware was 20230505. Yay! At least I did one thing that worked.

I need the config GUI to get the tuner to send the signal to VLC, but I still can't launch it on Debian because it ca't find the tuner. I wonder if I can tell the config GUI to use the tuner's IP address instead of its ID number.

[pbear]

I second @sunrat's suggestion. Your tests will be easier and more meaningful if running Debian on bare metal. Hardware pass-through is notoriously hit-or-miss with virtualization. If you don't want to modify the current hard drive, use full install to USB flash drive (at least 32 GB, more importantly, HAS to be 3.0 (rather than 2.0)). Just bear in mind, an OS on flash drive will be slow. You're not testing the OS per se, though - that should run pretty much the same from SSD as you're used to with Ubuntu - but rather hardware+software compatibility.

FWIW, if I were in your shoes, I'd go ahead and get the second SSD, install Debian on that and see how it goes. If doesn't work out, try something else, e.g., Mint. Gotta be something out there that'll work for you.

[JJJ]

FWIW, if I were in your shoes, I'd go ahead and get the second SSD, install Debian on that and see how it goes. If doesn't work out, try something else, e.g., Mint. Gotta be something out there that'll work for you.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to give up on Debian 12. I found a post in the forums here about HDHomeRun tuners with a lot of replies, ending in 2019, and not one of the users was able to get their tuner working on Debian. It works perfectly on Ubuntu, so I'm going to have to stay there. Too bad, because there's a lot that I like about Debian.

[sunrat]

Normally anything that works on Ubuntu can be made to work with Debian. Usually just a matter of drivers or firmware.
I still suspect your issue may have been more related to VBox than Debian.

[JJJ]

I still suspect your issue may have been more related to VBox than Debian.

VirtualBox is always a pain, but there was another thread with over a dozen different users, and not one of them got it working. And none of them were on VirtualBox or any other virtual machine. No, there is no doubt that Debian is the culprit here. Why it happens is an interesting question, but for me it's time to move on.

[pbear]

One cannot draw "no doubt" conclusions from any forum thread, much less one four years old. That's at least two major releases and many kernel updates ago. Anyhoo, take a look at Mint. As you probably know, based on Ubuntu and mostly relies on its repos. Notably, Mint is stripping out Snaps, so might be just what you're looking for. Available with the XFCE desktop (and two others).

By the way, for future reference, please post a link to the prior thread. I couldn't find it in a quick forum search. Thanks.

[JJJ]

This morning I discovered that the 2TB drive that I recently paid US$120 for has been reduced to $100, so I just went and bought one, and it's now installed in the computer. I had taken Mint Xfce for a spin in VirtualBox yesterday and it looked the same as it did when I tried it out several tears ago. Mint lovers, I'm sorry, but Mint is still hideous, hasslich, feote. I also checked out the possibility of removing Snap from Ubuntu, but 'sudo snap list' revealed that it was far more than Firefox and a couple other apps, even GTK and other fundamental parts of the OS are from Snap. So with the new drive in place I decided to reinstall Debian 12, just for kicks. I still had the ISO, so I used balena-Etcher to burn it to a small flash drive. Back when I installed it in VirtualBox I had tried this, but VirtualBox couldn't find the flash drive, so I had burned it to a DVD and used that to install it. Well, the flash drive failed again; it started to boot, but quickly stopped with a page of error messages. Well, screw it. Back to the DVD.

When the DVD booted I chose to boot directly to the 'Installation' version. I went through it all, creating a 300GB partition for / and the remainder for /Home. At the end of the installation it asked about how to configure Grub. It had found Xubuntu, and offered to set that up as a dual boot so I could choose which one to boot to. When it finished it shut down for a reboot, but I got no Grub choice; it just booted automatically to Xubuntu. I restarted it and hit the Esc key to get the Grub menu, and when it appeared the only choice was Xubuntu; no Debian to be found. At boot you can hit F12 and the BIOS will present a menu of devices so you can choose which drive to boot to. I did this, selected the new 2TB drive, but all that accomplished was getting me a black screen with an underscore flasing in the upper left corner. It looked like an old DOS prompt, but the keyboard was dead so I couldn't try anything.

I rebooted and came back to Xubuntu. I note that Xubuntu auto-mounted both partitions. I looked at the / partition and it looks like the installer did its job. Everything looks fine, including /boot/grub, and the grub folder is marked executable. I'm just scratching my head trying to figure out what went wrong, if it's repairable, and if so, how.

[sunrat]

If you want Xubuntu GRUB to boot other OSs, you probably need to re-enable os_prober (or manually add Debian) in /etc/default/grub and then run update-grub
Look for a line

Code: Select all

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true

and change it to

Code: Select all

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

[JJJ]

If you want Xubuntu GRUB to boot other OSs, you probably need to re-enable os_prober (or manually add Debian) in /etc/default/grub and then run update-grub
Look for a line

Code: Select all

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true

and change it to

Code: Select all

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

I looked through the grub.cfg file in Xubuntu's /boot/grub folder, and the closest I came was this:

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###

There were also at least 20 'menuentry' lines, all for Xubuntu in previous kernels. There was also this:

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###

I'm over my head here. I've never edited grub.cfg before.

[JJJ]

I decided to look at /boot/grub/grub.cfg on the / partition for the new drive (where Debian is installed) and I found that the menu entries started with Debian and Debian Advanced, and then proceeded to give 80 (yes, I counted them) menu entries for Ubuntu. In contrast the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file on the Ubuntu drive has only entries for Ubuntu. I think I need to figure out how to get the BIOS to use the new drive instead of the old drive.

Edit: It was simple; I just changed the boot order in the BIOS. But when the computer tried to boot to the new drive with Debian on it did the same as before; I just got a black screen with a flashing underscore in the upper left corner, and nothing further. It's not finding /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

[JJJ]

I finally managed to boot into the new installation, and after fixing the display (I'm on a 4K display) the first thing I did was install the HDHomeRun Config GUI utility. I installed it with Synaptic, and then noted that it had not created desktop file so there was no launch line in the application menu. I had the hdhr.desktop file from my Xubuntu machine, so on the command line I tried the executable in the file, and got 'command not found.' In Synaptic it shows that it is installed, and I even reinstalled it, but no way can I get it to launch. On my VirtualBox install of Debian 12 the utility appeared in the menu, and when launched it quit immediately with an error message that it couldn't find the tuner. Now, in the full install to disk things are even worse; it can't even be launched.

[JJJ]

Late tonight I made a breakthrough, although I don't know why it took me so long to notice this. Opening Synaptic on Debian (Debian in Virtualbox, 'cause I can't get the copy installed to disk to boot) I note that searching on 'hdhomerun' gets just hdhomerun-config. But searching in Ubuntu gets me hdhomerun-config and hdhomerun-config-gui. The only Debian based distros that I have tried so far are Mint, Debian 12, Xubuntu, and MX Linux. The GUI works on Xubuntu and Mint, but not on Debian 12 or MX Linux. And guess which ones install only the versions without the -gui? Yep, Debian 12 and MX Linux.

So for my next escapade I snuggled deep into Ubuntu's Universe repository and snagged hdhomerun-config-gui.deb, then booted Debian 12 on VirtualBox, and after a bit of dpkg magic had the deb file installed. It appeared in the menus and I launched it. Voilà! The GUI came up!

Now the bad news. The GUI can't see the tuner, so I'm still dead. But at least I've got part of the problem solved, and it would be easy to solve this part of the problem for everyone just by adding the -gui deb file into the repositories. Meanwhile, the tuner is still on my network at 192.168.1.112. Consider this from Debian 12 on VirtualBox:

Code: Select all

hdhomerun_config discover
   No devices found
hdhomerun_config discover 192.168.1.112
   Homerun device 103D39F1 found at 192.168.1.112

So the discover utility can't find the tuner either, that is, until you point it directly at it and prop its eyes open. If I could also find a way to tell the GUI where to find it I might have a complete solution.

[sarge]

It sounds like the GUI is sending a broadcast to the network. The chances are your VirtualBox VM is running on a different internal network and using NAT to get to your home devices. So browsing directly will work but broadcasting will not. This should be easy to confirm by comparing the IP addresses and subnet masks of your VM with your main network, or by checking the network settings in VirtualBox.

You should be able to solve this by configuring your VirtualBox VM to use a Bridged network. The documentation for VirtualBox implies this is easy to do, but I've not done it myself. It's certainly more complicated when using other virtualization solutions.

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06. ... rk_bridged

Once you've got this configured, your VM will be on the same network subnet as your real devices, and I would expect the tuner discovery part to work.

[JJJ]

It sounds like the GUI is sending a broadcast to the network. The chances are your VirtualBox VM is running on a different internal network and using NAT to get to your home devices. So browsing directly will work but broadcasting will not. This should be easy to confirm by comparing the IP addresses and subnet masks of your VM with your main network, or by checking the network settings in VirtualBox.
You should be able to solve this by configuring your VirtualBox VM to use a Bridged network. The documentation for VirtualBox implies this is easy to do, but I've not done it myself. It's certainly more complicated when using other virtualization solutions.
Once you've got this configured, your VM will be on the same network subnet as your real devices, and I would expect the tuner discovery part to work.

Brilliant! It's working!

I shut down the VirtualBox machine so the settings could be configured, then under Network, where it said it was connected to Nat in the drop-down, the next choice was Bridged, so I set it to that, then restarted the machine, opened the GUI, and it showed the tuner. All I had to do was choose a channel, click on View, and the tuner opened VLC and displayed live television, just like it is supposed to.

To summarize, there were two problems:
1) The only application in the repositories was hdhomerun-config, not hdhomerun-cobfig-gui. I uninstalled that and then installed the -gui via hdhomerun-config-gui.deb, which I downloaded from the Ubuntu Universe repository. That made the appear in the Xfce Whisker menu, so I could finally see the window, but the window did not show the tuner.
2) VirtualBox set the network to Nat, which the tuner couldn't use, but after changing it to Bridged the tuner was instantly seen by the hdhomerun-config-gui. et voilà, It's all working the same as it does on Ubuntu.

It took me two days to figure this all out and fix it. I should add that the hdhomerun-config-gui.deb may actually be in the Debian repositories, but the standard install utility didn't activate all the Debian repositories so I didn't see it. Or maybe it really is not in the repositories. I leave that to the folks at Debian who deal with such issues. In the meantime it can be easily downloaded from Ubuntu > Universe and installed with 'sudo dpkg hdhomerun-config-gui.deb'.

Edit: I forgot to say thank you to all the people who helped me solve this problem. I hope that this thread will help others fix their HDHomeRun problems. I'm also new to the Debian Forums, and I can't figure out how to mark this SOLVED.

[sunrat]

To mark solved, edit you first post and add prefix [Solved] to the title.

Generally it's not recommended to install packages from outside Debian repos and Ubuntu ones can be problematic especially in requiring
different version of dependency packages. See the wiki "Don't Break Debian"
In certain cases such as this, packages may be installed without issue particularly if they don't require other packages as dependencies. You got lucky with this one! hdhomerun-config-gui is not in Debian repos. You could submit a bug as a request for packaging but as it's a fairly niche package it would be unlikely to be included.