[mythtv-users] Is there a way out of this tar pit?

[John J Tucker]

Greetings,

I am really struggling to find a solution and I'm tired and out of ideas.  First, I have been running Mythtv for about 7 years since .21 I think. I have been using Mythbuntu mostly.  I month or two ago I started having problems and I thought that an upgrade to ubuntu might be the answer. I was running myth .27 and ubuntu (some version that would not upgrade to 12.10, I remember that I had to upgrade to 12.04 first and then 12.10)  The trouble stated there.  The upgrade failed and the FE/BE would no longer boot.  I thought OK, all of the important files are on separate disks and the boot disk only contains ubuntu and mythtv and I have backups of the important config files (etc/fstab, avahi configs, netatalk...) so all I had to do was install ubuntu 12.10 from the ISO's dl from the ubuntu web site. Well these ISOs will not boot, some nonsense about not finding a live file system.  I google'd the exact error and most of the results were many years old and the remedy was to switch the master/slave jumpers on the IDE HD/DVD drives.  I found this to make no sense at all and it did not fix the problem.  I got fed up with ubuntu and while IDE is legacy hardware, that is what I have and it has worked fairly well.  I have a small IDE HD and all of the big storage drives (2x3TB + 8TB RAID) are SATA and I don't care if they even show up during the install because I have to add gparted, xfs file system support and edit fstab before they are usable.

I switched to Debian wheezy and found it lacking in many ways.  The packages I was interested in were not current and I don't know enough about Debian ways to hook-up the versions I wanted/needed.  My Mythtv database was .27 and the debian multimedia sources had .25. I don't know what headaches were inflicted by attempting to go back with the database.  I downloaded Mythtv .27 source and compiled it and restored the database and was about to start configuring the BE.  I was also intrested in pulseaudio and found the current version is 5 and debian had version 2 installed.  VLC presented an error stating that pulseaudio version 2 had to much latency and suggested updating to version 3. I attempted to compile pulseaudio and there was no end to the pain.  No documentation as to how to run configure and multiple errors with missing this and missing that. So after about five fix this, add this lib I completed the configure, make and make install.  I then attempted pulseaudio --version and some lib is missing.

So, is there some other linux distro that I can build Mythtv .27 and pulseaudio 3+.  I would prefer prebuilt binary packages but if the source packages have adequate documentation, I'm OK with that.

Thanks for any and all advice.

adios,
jt