[SC.LUG] Fedora Core 4 rocks for MythTV :)

[Cockroft, John]

I just wanted to share this with the LUG as I do my 'engineers victory
dance'!

It was suggested that I do a bit on getting MythTV to run on Fedora Core
4.  At the time I hadn't got MythTV running properly on *any*
distribution despite having hacked around with it on several distros
including Fedora Core 3, Mandrake 10.1 Ubuntu and SimplyMEPIS so I was
not qualified so-to-speak.

That has now changed :)

When I first tried FC4, it was the Test3 version which was very buggy
and incompatible with the (then) current ATrpms.  I couldn't get kernel
compiles to work properly without panic(king) and the MythTV packages
wouldn't install properly.

I gave up for a while having completely failed to get MythTV running.  3
days ago, I decided to have another go and downloaded the latest FC3 iso
images to try again.  I have just finished a rebuild of my Myth box
using the released Fedora Core 4 (32 bit) and it is completely awesome!

The Video-for-Linux drivers are all compiled into the default FC4 kernel
and the Hauppauge Nova-T was picked up by UDev and installed correctly
(all correct modules appearing in an lsmod listing).  (Note that my card
is a Conexant (90002) chipset one and not the very latest Hauppauge
Nova-T.  I've no idea if the latest one is supported yet).

The only minor fault was that the DVB devices were given mode 0660
rather than 0666 (which is needed by the video software) so a minor hack
adding MODE="0666" to the dvb recogniser in the rules.d directory solved
that.  I will email the fix to the Fedora team.

ATrpms (http://www.atrpms.net) now fully supports apt-get for FC4
(hurray!) as well as the synaptic graphical front end so installing new
software on FC4 is as easy as the Debian based distros.  (I know that
yum is better for mixed 32/64 bit architectures but apt-get is still
light years ahead of yum in all other cases IMHO and synaptic is just a
joy to use).  I would have no hesitation on recommending FC4 to
*anybody* including newbies - it is *that* good (and I am still a fan of
MEPIS and Ubuntu!)

To install MythTV

Download this
http://dl.atrpms.net/all/atrpms-kickstart-27-1.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm 

# rpm -ivh atrpms-kickstart-27-1.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm
# apt-get update (to download the latest package lists)
# apt-get dist-update (took 4 hours and downloaded 950Mb on my PC!)

I would suggest

# apt-get install synaptic

For the video applications

# apt-get install mplayer
# apt-get install mythtv-suite

and it's that easy!

There are some other things that you need which are not in ATrpms.  They
are

dvbstream (compile from source)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvbtools/ 

tzap and scan (compile from source)
http://linuxtv.org/downloads/dvb/linuxtv-dvb-apps-1.1.0.tar.bz2

channels.conf (the Winter Hill one!)
http://linux.mikeasoft.com/dvb.php 

and you are pretty much done in terms of software installation.

I then followed this guide

http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/mythdvb.html 

Hope this is of some use...?

John Cockroft