[mythtv-users] Migrating ATI -> NVidia

[Nick Rout]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 5:57 AM, Arthur Green <arthur at phraction.org> wrote:
> Having spent considerable time wrestling with fglrx, I've finally thrown
> in the towel and installed a combined FE/BE using an NVidia 7000-series
> card(a Shuttle with onboard NVidia graphics). The previous system had an
> ATI X1200. Installation and configuration was a doddle compared with the
> ATI system - no wrangling Xorg.conf and aticonfig, no tussling with
> interlacing. The ATI system would grind to a halt every few minutes with
> the dreaded "NVP: Timed out waiting for free video buffers" message
> during playback or live TV.
>
> The migration from an ATI-based machine to NVidia (including OS and
> MythTV installation, copying 80+ GB of content, configuration and
> testing) took about 10 hours, with much of that being taken up with an
> overnight copying of recorded content. The really nice thing was being
> able to install the NVidia drivers and MythTV, setup MythTV and start
> the front end for the first time and be able to watch TV without having
> to spend a week fiddling with the X server configuration.
>
> I also took the opportunity to move to Fedora 9 on the new system, and
> pretty much all the snags I hit were to do with KDE4. It was the first
> time I'd seen KDE4 and I have to admit it takes a bit of getting used
> to. It's a huge change from KDE3.x (which is what I've been using on
> Linux systems for several years). I still can't figure out how to shut
> off the stupid login and logout music - KDE4 doesn't seem to have any
> way to configure that. The GUI for auto-login is also broken, so I ended
> up manually editing the gdm configuration.
>
> So - MythTV with an NVidia graphics card gets a big thumbs-up, but KDE4
> is something of a shock to the system.


Can't say i would bother with kde for a myth system. Yes a window
manager is needed for focusing on the open window for mplayer etc, but
something nice and light like ratpoison or flux|blackbox will do it.