[mythtv-users] MythTV Installer Usability: An Analysis

[Dewey Smolka]

On 11/4/05, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu <f-myth-users at media.mit.edu> wrote:
>     Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 00:47:42 -0500
>     From: Dewey Smolka <dsmolka at gmail.com>
>
> Just a meta-comment here:  If you dismiss every possible complaint
> with, "you're a moron for even suggesting that this is a problem,"
> then, no, I guess there are no bugs here.  But let's assume that,
> despite appearances, this wasn't actually what you are trying to do.

I'm not trying to dismiss everything you're saying, and neither am I
calling you or anyone else names. And neither am I claiming that
MythTV or Knoppmyth are bug-free.

But at the same time you seem to be searching for problems rather than
solutions. Also you're going a bit scattershot with issues that are
specific to MythTV, specific to Knoppmyth, specific to Knoppix-Debian,
and specific to your hardware without really thinking about them in
context.


>     Of course, most people will never see it at all because a PVR,
>     particularly MythTV, isn't really designed for live TV, and certainly
>     not for 5.3 hours of live TV.
>
> Sure.  Until you happen to, say, leave it set on live TV, turn off the
> television, and go to bed.  (That's not what I did, but I figured it
> wouldn't hurt to -test- that possibility.)
>
> Then, when you wake up in the morning, your machine is totally
> screwed---not only will any scheduled recordings on other tuners have
> (probably) gotten trashed due to thrashing the disk channel, but your
> UI is stone-cold dead and unresponsive until you reboot, and any other
> FE's depending on this BE are broken, too.  This isn't my idea of the
> sort of reliability an appliance should have.

This still ignores the point that you're not using your appliance in
the recommended fashion. You could also complain that leaving your
coffee machine on overnight causes the caraffe to become uncleanable
and ruined. It may be true, but that is not how you're supposed to use
it.


>
>     <snip>
>     > (S-2) The SQL database is being mis-initialized, or whatever is
>     > using it is becoming confused, in a way which is causing brand new
>     > installations to fail, in the case where the backend and the frontend
>     > are different machines.  The failure typically manifests as follows:
>     > <snip>
>
>     Never seen this, but then again, I like to make sure that my BEs are
>     properly set up and network addresses properly set before adding FEs.
>     The steps are fairly well documented.
>
> The BE -was- set up first.  It has to be, after all.  And all network
> addresses were correctly set.  The problem came in -then- setting up a
> FE that could talk to the BE.  THIS IS A BUG---and a new one, apparently.

If this is the case, then this is something specific to Knoppmyth, not
MythTV. You may have also noted that R5A22 is based on an SVN build,
and as such is not only Alpha (the A), but outside of the stable .18.1
MythTV release. Please see Isaac's comments on this. Either way, this
isn't really the place to complain about issues specific to Knoppmyth,
since not everyone here uses it.

<snip>
>     > (S-3) The installer's default choice of monitor sync rates isn't
>     > conservative enough.  This came up (I think!) because I'm using a
>     > crappy old video card to do my installations, because I -know- that my
>     > real frontend is going to be the video-out on a PVR-350 and my -good-
>     > cards are in other machines.
>
>     Why would you have a PVR-350 in a front-end? If it's capturing, then
>     it's not a FE. If you're going out to a monitor, you're not using the
>     350. Why use a 350 at all when you can get just as good a picture for
>     less money with a cheap nvidia card?
>
> The 350 will eventually also be capturing, and the FE will thus be
> transformed into a slave backend via some setup & NFS links, as is
> documented in mysettopbox.tv/linhes.html.  [...]But getting the
> eventual SBE set up first as an FE simplifies life and makes debugging
> easier, especially since the SBE -will- be getting used as an FE
> because it's the machine that will be rendering video (via the 350).

There's no doubt that it's easier to set up a FE than a SBE. But at
the same time, I'd recommend against using the PVR 350's out -- you're
making the setup more complicated than it needs to be, plus you're
asking for headaches when it comes to getting X, MPEG-4 playback, and
other FE features running properly on the 350. As I suggested, you're
much better off using a cheap nvidia card for TV-out through S-vid,
which would also mean that you can put the 350 in the BE and not worry
about a SBE.


<snip>
>     > picked H: 35.2Khz, V: 86.4Hz and my (fairly new ProView) LCD monitor
>     > instantly choked and said "invalid refresh rate".
>
>     You really shouldn't (can't) be sending a signal out of a PVR 350 to
>     an LCD monitor. That is pointless.
>
> I wasn't doing that.  The signal was being sent out of an old video
> card, and the installer guessed wrong on X sync for the card.

Neither MythTV nor Knoppmyth is responsible for an incompatible video
card. I also believe there is a command line tool in Knoppmyth for
auto-generating xorg.conf/XFree86.conf, but it's been a while since I
used Debian.


<snip>
>     > So:  C-Alt-F1'ed and got a text console, spent a while figuring where
>     > the heck an editor was
>
>     $vi
>
> Yeah, if you use and can stand vi.  (Please note I was attempting to
> -avoid- the inevitable religious war here, and even said so up front.)
><snip>

I didn't bring up a religious war, you did. I think a person can like
both coffee and tea. If one is not available, the other is. If you
demand coffee but only tea is available, then go and get some coffee.
But don't complain that tea is inferior, or that you've been drinking
coffee for so long that you're somehow prevented from drinking tea.

The fact is that vi is included, as is nano. It is not difficult to
use, and anyone who has trouble opening, altering, and saving a file
using vi has no business attempting a MythTV setup. If you prefer
emacs or Kate or something else, then by all means install it.
However, suggesting that vi is somehow unusable for newbies because
you are familiar with emacs, well that's just silly.


<snip>
>     >  I can't figure out
>     > if the error is important or completely ignorable, though, and some
>     > guidance would be nice.  (It's also got a typo in it; see "sic";
>     > typos matter 'cause they make it harder to grep for errors.)
>     >
>     > 13:40:15.539 connecting to backend server: 127.0.0.1:6543 (try 1 of 1)
>     > 13:40:15.587 connection timed out
>     >                 you should probably modify the Master Server settings in the setup program and set the proper IP address
>
>     That last line sounds like pretty good guidance to me.
>
> But it was already correctly set.  The SQL database-initialization bug
> was causing the machine to alternate between using its configured
> non-loopback address, and the loopback address---this is the heart
> of the bug I was reporting there, not a side-effect.  And given the
> other issues, it's probably new between whatever builds were used
> in A16 and A22, . . .

Again, this issue is with Knoppmyth and would be better taken up with
Cecil and the other Knoppmyth developers.

<snip>
> All I can say is (a) even following the directions, such as they are,
> this was not as easy -as it could have been-; (b) I'm more experienced
> than many in system setup, so I worry about what it's like for those
> with less experience; and (c) there are piles of complaints
> (especially over on the KnoppMyth forums---I haven't read enough the
> archives yet to know about here) from users who've screwed something
> up when they tried to install, in ways that could probably be easily
> prevented by small bugfixes and attention to the UI.

I think you have a fundamental misundertanding of what Knoppmyth is
supposed to be. It is a self-contained package that includes OS,
MythTV, and all the dependencies. The idea is to simplify the setup
and eliminate the need to dowload various packages and kernel modules.

It is NOT, however, a fool-proof installation for newbies. Ironically
(because it appears more complicated), it is far more effective, and
easier, for someone with little Linux experience to install MythTV by
following Jarod Wilson's excellent guide or one of the other
step-by-step guides than to do it with Knoppmyth.

This is not to criticize the excellent work that Cecil has done, quite
the contrary. But all the same, Knoppmyth is simplified but not
simple. If a person doesn't understand the various components of
MythTV and how they all fit together then a Knoppmyth install can be a
frustrating experience.

At this point, it takes me only an hour or two to set up a Knoppmyth
machine, while one based on Fedora takes the better part of a day. But
my first attempt at MythTV, through Knoppmyth, took me more than a
week to get running, and several weeks before I had it running how I
wanted.

In switching my MBE to Fedora, I learned what components go where,
what needs to talk to what and how, and all the steps that are
necessary between downloading an iso and recording television. Once a
person understands this, it is much easier to pinpoint where things go
wrong, and thus it becomes much easier (and faster) to install
Knoppmyth.

Good luck