[mythtv-users] Can an old school installation be salvaged?

[Gavin Haslett]

On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 08:27 -0400, Dan Berger wrote:
> Has anyone been able to make this comeback? Is the only way of moving
> forward starting from scratch? Should I try switching to yum? Any
> advice would be greatly appreciated.

I'm in a similar, but not identical quandry. I have FC3 and 0.20. I know
where you're coming from and my box has been stable as hell since...
well... forever. I've also not updated because of the repo problem.

Now, I already switched to SD. The process was actually pretty painless.
The only "oh hell" moment I had was when I had to run a MYSQL command to
extend the programid by (I think) two digits in order to support the new
format. After that, I did a manual upgrade of the XML grabber (compiled
from source), then I just create a CRON job that runs every night and
downloads the new data from SD. Once that's done, the script then runs a
mythfilldatabase and reads from the data that was downloaded.

All in all pretty painless... certainly more painless than upgrading or
reinstalling my entire system.

Having said that, I have still had problems. Shows that previously
recorded have been re-recorded and some shows with new episodes wouldn't
record because they thought the episode was already there. In the end I
just selectively picked out the shows I wanted to make sure recorded and
told Myth to "forget" all the previous recordings and I just weed out
the repeats manually every few days or once a week.

Of course, long term I plan to trash the box and rebuild anyway. FC3 was
great for its day but I do feel that it's unnecessarily encumbered with
crap and bloat. Maybe that comes of running Gentoo servers for the last
couple of years (personally and at work), but I like having a slim
system that boots quickly... my Myth box is painful to reboot.
Thankfully that doesn't happen very often :)

Gavin