[mythtv-users] Wife Acceptance Factor question: dealing with crashes

Stephen Longhurst steve at longsteve.com
Thu Oct 21 15:50:15 UTC 2004


>> She loves it.  However, Myth seems to crash a lot.  Mostly it's the
>> frontend, usually in response to some apparently random button press
>> on the remote, but occassionally the backend crashes.  Since I'm using
>> the same motherboard Jarod specs in his guide (Chaintech 7NIF2 using
>> the onboard video; also a pair of  PVR250s), and nothing else is
>> running on these machines,  I'm assuming that I'm not the only one
>> living with these problems.
> To solve this problem, I wired two buttons on my remote:
> 1. POWER - This will run a script that kills the frontend and restarts it.
> 2. BLANK (not labeled) - This will issue the reboot command and take
> down the whole system.

I have my whole machine booting up into mythfrontend in a completely
usable state, which is great.  The backend seems very stable, running
for months at a time without problems.  However, the frontend does
seem to crash every now and again.  I have a PVR-350 and use the TV
out, so I have a script that runs in a xterm when my mythtv users X
session starts up:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]
do
  ivtvfbctl /dev/fb0 -globalalpha -nolocalalpha -alpha 255
  DISPLAY=:0.1 mythfrontend | tee mythfrontend.log
done

With this, whenever the frontend stops, it resets the PVR-350 alpha
values and restarts mythfrontend.

This keeps my wife (and me) happy. I've not had to reboot my machine
for months now. FYI I'm running Gentoo linux with a 2.4.26 patched up
kernel, ivtv ck71d, mythtv 0.15.1 (actually, a cvs build from the time
of the 0.15.1 release).

I'm now having the dilemma of whether or not to upgrade to the latest
version since there are some fixs and new function (to DVB especially)
that I would love to have.  I don't want to mess with a great
functioning system though!

Cheers,

       Steve

-- 
Stephen Longhurst
iomo ltd.



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