[mythtv-users] Considering Switch from Fedora to Ubuntu

Peter Watkins peterw at tux.org
Wed Aug 29 14:58:52 UTC 2007


Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 12:02:10PM -0400, joe.white at wachovia.com wrote:
> I have used Fedora with my MythTV box since I first discovered this list a 
> few years ago.  Primarily, because of Jarod's guide.  With the new 
> release, I am considering switching over to Feisty Fawn 

> I have 
> not yet found what seems to be a complete HOWTO on the subject and I have 
> the feeling that Myth on Feisty may be problematic, specifically with 
> regards to sound and iirc.  Am I reading things correctly?  Or have I just 
> beeen reading the gloomy postings?

I just switched from i386/FC4/"Jarod" to amd64/Feisty. I missed Jarod's guide
for some of the "sticky" issues & small details. For the most part, getting 
MythTV running on Feisty was simple & painless (including LIRC with the help of
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Install_Lirc_Feisty -- in FC4 I had to
compile LIRC from source because the FC/AT package didn't support my IR
receiver). But I ran into a few sticky issues:

 1) capture card kernel module load order
I have two capture cards: a pcHDTV HD3000, and a dual-tuner PVR-500. Feisty 
does not, out of the box, have a fixed order for loading the relevant kernel
modules. I spent some time learning "the Ubuntu way" to specify module load
order (use modprobe.d/blacklist to prevent autoload, specify order in modules,
IIRC). Otherwise I ended up with my /dev/videoN devices mapping to different
cards after reboots. I thought Jarod had documented this fairly well, but it
now seems that my memory may be faulty. :-)

 2) audio device kernel module load order
My MythTV box is my "media PC", running SlimServer in addition to MythTV. I
have three audio devices in it -- the onboard audio I use for MythTV playback,
an old PCI card I use to stream my stereo system's music to SlimServer, and
a USB-based FM radio. As above, it took some tweaking of module configuration
to get this working reliably after every reboot. IIRC, the critical thing was
setting index= lines in the ALSA modprobe.d file to fix the ALSA/hw device
numbers for the 2 internal sources.

 3) SATA drivers and "md" RAID arrays
All my data is on "md" RAID1 space. The OS is on a couple md devices on the
two IDE disks, but my media files reside on an LVM that spans both IDE and
SATA devices. After a few reboots I hit a snag that others have reported:
the Ubuntu initramfs image doesn't always load the "piix" module in time to
see the SATA devices & make sense of their md devices, and, even though
there are no OS files on SATA, this can stop the system from booting, dropping
the console to a busybox shell prompt. Tweaking the initramfs-tools/modules
file and rebuilding the initramfs module seemed to solve the problem -- but 
since it didn't always manifest itself, I'm not really sure.

 4) the usual NVidia config issues
I couldn't just drop my old Fedora xorg.conf file in place after installing
the proprietary NVidia driver; I had to do more fiddling with it to get HD
playback looking alright. Setting NvAGP to 2 seemed most helpful.

I'm not recommending you avoid Feisty, just pointing out the more noteworthy
events in my Jarod -> Feisty move, since you seem to be in a very similar 
cicumstance. Overall, I am very pleased. 

Now to upgrade to .20.2 and get SchedulesDirect working...

-Peter



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