[HLUG] MythTv Ups and Downs

[matt stone]

Afternoon all folks, i thought i'd let you know how i got on with mythtv.

Well, in short, yes i got it working! All was fine and dandy for
around 24 hours until my machine started locking up on boot when
bringing up the network. Not good as i'd set a cron job to shut the
machine down at 2.15am every day.

I use linksys wireless cards and the open source ralink driver from
serial monkey which have worked a treat for me on my desktop machine
running Fedora Core 6 with kernel 2.6.19. Anyways, after much
investigating it turns out that both the official Ralink driver and
the the serialmonkey driver don't work with kernel 2.6.20. Guess what
i'd installed when i ran yum -y upgrade on initial install? Yup,
you've guessed it :)

Anyway, to cut a long story short, i decided to trash the install and
start from scratch. The main problem i had was getting my machine to
upgrade from kernel 2.6.18 to 2.6.19 so i could install the livna
nvidia drivers (i couldn't 2.6.18 versions anywhere). So i'm back to
the beginning almost. I've managed to upgrade to kernel 2.6.19, get
nvidia graphics installed and i'm now running yum install mythtv-suite
which i reckon is going to take a good hour.

My initial impressions of mythtv were very good. I didn't find it too
difficult to get upo and running with my hardware. I even got my
remote and front display working with minimal effort. The only problem
i did have was getting my channel information correct, mythtvsetup
insisted on assigning channel icons and info for the epg to empty
channels and assigning the actual channels random daft names, a bit of
tinkering in the setup and noting down the frequencies then entering
them manually seemed to sort that problem out.

If anyones thinking of giving it a go, i'd say do it. Just make sure
the hardware you buy is still supported by the time you get round to
building the damn thing :)

Cheers
Matt