[mythtv-users] How can I get my monitorless backend to start up

[Raymond Wagner]

Brian Wood wrote:
> On Friday 17 April 2009 20:38:48 Raymond Wagner wrote:
>   
>> I am completely baffled by this entire thread.  The machine has no
>> monitor.  Why is there any mention of trying to run Xorg or GDM or KDM
>> or messing with the xorg.conf when there is no monitor to use them on?
>> It's not like you need these programs running to have a completely
>> functional linux system.
>>     
>
> But not a completely functional MythTV system.
>
> Agreed in general, but a Myth backend expects to see X to run things like its 
> setup.
>
> It doesn't matter if the display is local, remote, real or virtual, so long as 
> X and thus MythTV-setup is happy.
>
> I'd like to be able to run the B/E setup over an ssh session, but it doesn't 
> seem to work that way, at least not for me. Every now and then somebody 
> complains about the disk space taken up by X, but compared to the rest of 
> Myth it's pretty trivial, especially with modern hard drive sizes.
>   
You don't even need X installed to run mythtv, you only need a handful 
of libraries.  VNC, SSH forwarding, or even just using 'DISPLAY' to 
point to a remote server works just fine.  My backend runs perfectly 
fine on a machine with a monitor, but no X installation.  I go down into 
the basement maybe once every couple months on the rare event something 
breaks.

If you can't get the backend setup working remotely, it's probably 
because you are trying to use OpenGL, and it's not being forwarded over 
SSH properly.  Try running it with '-O ThemePainter=qt'.