[mythtv] running mythtv without a WM

[James Fidell]

Quoting Brian Foddy (bfoddy at visi.com):

> I've had good luck with icewm.  It doesn't mess up the sound,
> loads fast, has basic window focus features, and seems pretty small.
> 
> I just setup a .xinitrc starting 
> 
> irxevent &
> mythfrontend &
> icewm-light  (or icewm)
> 
> (this is from memory, not the exact contents, but close).

Simiarly, I have a .xinitrc for root:

  fvwm &
  irxevent &
  exec mythfrontend

I'm using RH8.0 and wanted mythtv to start-up on boot, so I've modified
/etc/inittab to run my own script rather than starting X normally when
entering init level 5:

  # Run xdm in runlevel 5
  # xdm is now a separate service
  #x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon
  x:5:respawn:/usr/local/bin/startmyth

as well as disabling all but one of the mingetty processes.

/usr/local/bin/startmyth is:

  #!/bin/sh

  PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/lib/qt3-gcc3.2/bin:/root/bin:$PATH
  export PATH
  HOME=/root
  export HOME

  exec /usr/bin/X11/startx

I needed the HOME shenannigans to get around the fact that startx looks for
.xinitrc in $HOME.  For root, this should be /root, but when init is run,
$HOME is set to /.

I also turned off all non-necessary daemons started at boot time and by
configuring the X server to look for fonts directly itself, this also
meant I could turn off the font server.

This leaves me with about 50 entries in the process table, most of which
are unavoidable kernel-level stuff (though I could drop more of those if
I ran ext2 rather than ext3).

All this means that my 256MB PIII-733 now rarely uses swap whilst running
mythtv and can quite happily play back and record at the same time.

James