[mythtv-users] Notes on Jarod's guide

[Jon Waite]

Having successfully built a MythTV box in the past using Jarod's excellent
guide, I wasn't expecting any problems - but found a few bits that may need
to be updated/changed in the document as I was following through today
building a new one...

1) Step 3 in the guide (Initial Software) describes the packages to install
and then the partitioning scheme to be used, these steps are reversed in the
FC1 installation - having them the other way around in the guide to match
would make more sense (?)

2) The apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade in Step 6 grabs a *whole* new
load of stuff (even more than it did before), the biggest addition appears
to be an upgrade of KDE from 3.1.4 to 3.2.0. I pre-loaded my
/var/cache/apt/archives with all of the atRPMS I'd used last time I built a
Myth box using Jarod's guide (about a month ago just after 0.14 made it to
atRPMS) and it still needed to download an additional 100Mb or so.

3) As has already been mentioned, Axel hasn't built the Nvidia kernel module
rpms for the nvidia driver for the latest available atRPMS kernel
(2.4.22-1.2174.nptl_38.rhfc1.at), temporary solution - use the
2.4.22-1.2174.nptl_37.rhfc1.at kernel instead when following step 7 in the
guide.

4) The apt-get install mythtv-suite in Step 10 fails with the old issue
again - redhat-artwork conflicting with gtk/gtk+ even with the
apt.kde-redhat.org commented out and apt-get update as described in Step 6.
My temporary solution was to simply apt-get remove redhat-artwork and re-run
apt-get install mythtv-suite.

5) artsd in KDE 3.2.0 is hard to get rid of - the description of the option
to disable it has changed to something like 'Disable Sound System' instead
of 'Disable artsd' and even after selecting this I found at random times it
would respawn. I haven't found a clean way of disabling it (yet) so I've
just renamed the artsd file for now. Attempting to use ALSA output with
artsd running resulted in /dev/dsp 'in use' errors.

6) In Step 11 the wget
http://atrpms.physik.fu-berlin.de/dist/common/ivtv-firmware/ivtv-firmware-17
_21288-1.at.src.rpm fails - the file is no longer there and returns and
index.html page of the atRPMs site. I had this kicking around already from
previous installs, but others probably wouldn't have and need to know what
to replace it with.

7) This box has a PVR-350, following the (new) instructions in Step 11 to
modprobe tveeprom resulted in the module loading, but no logged entries in
dmesg, still not sure why and will do some more digging (I already knew my
tuner type was 28 so a bit of a moot point anyway).

8) The video capture test (Step 11) doesn't work for me unless I fire up
ptune.pl or ptune-ui.pl and set the channel to a valid one. This may be just
a New Zealand thing, but I think that the document should mention that (at
least) some countries will need the tuner manually set to a valid channel
before anything other than static is going to be recorded.

9) LIRC isn't working for me with the Hauppauge PVR350 remote, haven't
worked out why yet - everything loads correctly, the log output indicates
everything is detected and configured, the modules load, the daemon starts
fine and gets connections from irw fine, but no input is received from the
remote (nothing appears on screen with irw). Will investigate this further -
I *think* that lirc 0.7pre1 got installed by the apt-get (instead of 0.7pre2
or 0.7pre3) which could explain it... Will do some more digging on this.

10) Still had the normal (New Zealand) problem running mythfilldatabase -
the definition for tv_grab_nz isn't created where it's expected to be
(~/.xmltv/tv_grab_nz.conf) so the script can't find it. After manually
running tv_grab_nz --configure and selecting channels and successfully
running mythfilldatabase, you still need to go in via MythWeb to enter the
Tuner channel numbers (which are completely missing in the database), but I
suspect these are all NZ only problems and relatively easily worked around.

Thanks again to Jarod for putting together such an awesome guide, hopefully
this feedback will be of use.