[mythtv] Matrox G200 TV out works! HOWTO!

[Ryan A. Carris]

I'm in the same boat John.  I'm very experainced w/ Windows, and have 
tinkered with FreeBSD for many years, but new to Linux just to get Myth 
working.  I tried Debian last week, because of the packages.  But, it is 
pretty difficult to install  and configure compared to the other distros 
out there - Wow.  Much worse than I ever expected.  IMHO, worse then 
FreeBSD, but that is another holy war.

Therefore, I looked at RedHat, Susie, and Mandrake.  Susie was out, 
because although i've heard great things about it, Myth's documentation 
has no mention of it.  Mandrake won  once I saw that the webpage said 
the final step of the install was to configure the Tv Card - which did 
work out of the box.  

I installed Mandrake Monday night - no problems whatsoever. Worked on 
Myth for the past two days, and with the documentation, reading every 
post to the mailinglist three time, and a lot of patients, I got it 
working (sort-of, several kinks to work out).  

Mandrake 9.0 is very slick.  It has some quirks and things that I don't 
like (like booting directly into KDE w/o login). But it is slick and 
easy to install- definately makes distro choice the least of your 
concerns.  But, bottom line is that you should really install what ever 
distro you can get the most help on.  If you have no local friends, then 
I would really recommend Mandrake. Its easy to install and if you can't 
get Mandrake help, usually the RedHat help works because they are so 
similar.

RAC

John wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>Well, I've just ordered myself a G200 (16mb AGP) and am ready to take the
>MythTV plunge!  It will be a dedicated MythTV system.  I have read the G200
>How-To (several times) and the additions to it.  Here's the problem...
>
>I'm a very experienced s/w developer, but it's all in Windows (and DOS
>device drivers if that counts for anything ;-).  I have a boxed copy of SuSE
>8.0 Personal here next to me and a PIII-800, 512mb RAM, 80gb ready to use.
>The problem is that I don't know what the best version of Linux is for my
>G200 setup?  Isaac uses Debian Unstable, Ray (below) has a RH 8 RPM but
>that's just the kernels (not sure how close that gets me?), and other
>threads say Gentoo is fastest.  Ideally, I'd download an ISO image, burn it,
>and install the new system from that, but I know that's asking waaaay to
>much.  So, what's the simplest way to get this new system up-and-running?
>I've only installed Linux twice and both times from "pre-packaged" installs.
>HD formats and cmd lines don't scare me.  Docs that "assume" a lot do. ;-)
>
>If I downloaded the Debian image Isaac points us to and installed it, it
>wouldn't have the support for the G200 built-in right?  Is it an easy add
>then or do you almost start over to add that?
>
>I'm willing to learn and contribute code (lots of C++ experience).  Would I
>be best off going for the CVS setup?
>
>Thanks VERY much!
>John
>  
>