[mythtv-users] Help running mythtv-setup

[Michael T. Dean]

On 03/09/2012 08:57 AM, James Klaas wrote:
> I'll be trying what Michael Watson said:
>
>> ... setting up a Backend only (No Frontend).  I found that I needed to install the frontend package
>> before I could set the Country/Language properly.)
> Unfortunately it's things like this that also irritate me, I shouldn't
> have to install the frontend to configure a backend only.  You can't
> have mythweather without the front end either.  Why would I need to do
> that at all on a backend-only system with mythweather on the web
> interface.  I'm willing to deal with quirks like this, but if I don't
> know about them, it's pointless.  This essentially a bare install.
> Whether the software is "beta" or not (the language issue happened in
> the 0.24 packages too), it shouldn't happen on a bare install.
>

FWIW, MythTV does not support any mechanism of having a frontend-only or 
backend-only install.  Some distro packagers have decided, however, to 
split up the single installation that MythTV provides into multiple 
packages.

When considering MythTV code, only, the difference between a 
frontend-only and backend-only installation is about 10MB of HDD space 
(therefore, is a complete waste of all the effort to break things up) 
because most of the code exists in libraries that are shared and used by 
both the frontend and backend binaries.

So, the only approach "supported" by MythTV is to install the frontend 
and backend and all libraries on all MythTV-code-running hosts.  If you 
find issues with broken-into-separate-pieces packages, you'll need to 
get the packager to fix what they've broken by splitting things up.

(This said, there may be some reason packagers are doing this--perhaps 
to allow you to specify what other stuff to set up, like setting up 
MySQL server and mythconverg database on the master backend or setting 
up X server on a frontend system (versus just X libraries on a backend 
system) or...--but it would be really nice if there were a better way.  
Not knowing why they're breaking up the package, I can't even recommend 
other approaches.  I will say, however, if it's being split up for 
"saving storage space", they're wasting a /lot/ of time and effort (both 
packagers' and users') for a few measly megabytes of HDD space on a 
system that processes multi-gigabyte files--especially when 10MB is 
nothing compared to even flash thumb drives and such.)

Mike