I just set up an xbox as a mythfrontend last night. Here's my story.
My original xbox hard drive kicked the bucket a long time ago, so I
replaced it with a 2.5GB drive I had lying around. I'm using it solely
for mythtv and don't care about xbox games, so i flashed the tsop with
the most recent version of raincoat. I downloaded xfedora test 4 from:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.not404.com/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi/wiki/XFedora4">http://www.not404.com/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi/wiki/XFedora4</a><br>
<br>
and installed in the nogames, interactive mode. Since I'm using quite
a small drive, I installed only the most basic options I thought were
necessary and worth the space: X11, sound and video, mysql (i don't
know if it was necessary), network servers. Maybe a couple others.
Total install was about 1.5GB. I made sure to not install kde or gnome
or any development tools to save space on the install. The
installation went very smooth, though I was using the http source so it
took a while. <br>
<br>
once it was up and running, i had to do a few things. added mythtv user
and set password. changed /etc/inittab to start in runlevel 5 instead
of 3 so X loads automatically. I installed WindowMaker with "yum
install WindowMaker", and then as mythtv "switchdesk WindowMaker" to
use it by default. Once that was done, I switched to runlevel 5 "init
5" to load X, logged into X as mythtv and ran gmdsetup to setup
autologin for mythtv. Then I added the atrpms and freshrpms yum repos
as posted on Jarod's Mythtvology page:<br>
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/<br>
wget <a href="http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/atrpms.repo">http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/atrpms.repo</a><br>
wget <a href="http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/freshrpms.repo">http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/freshrpms.repo</a><br>
<br>
After that I tried to install mythtv-suite with "yum install
mythtv-suite". This gave me a little hangup. I needed to change the
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo so the gpg key line was
"gpgkey=<a href="file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY">file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY</a>" instead of
"gpgkey=<a href="file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora">file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora</a>". After that the
mythtv-suite install went smooth and then a "yum upgrade" to update all
the packages also went smooth. I did run out of disk space during the
yum upgrade so I moved the downloaded packages directory
(/var/cache/yum) to an NFS mount on my master backend to free up some
space for the upgrade. <br><br>After the yum upgrade, I made sure to change
the /boot/grub/grub.conf to load the xbox.kernel by default instead of
the newer one yum installed just to be safe. I don't know if that was
necessary; maybe the new kernel is good enough for the xbox. I ran
mythtvsetup manually once from within X to make sure it was setup
appropriately and then tried mythfrontend. I think mythtvsetup was
unnecessary, because the mysql stuff is all I setup there (making sure
not to change any of the capture card or channel settings as that
affects the back end). I noticed that the mysql stuff is also in the
configuration on mythfrontend. After this I quit myth and changed to
runlevel 3 to kill X (init 3), and I followed the instructions on a
page from Jarod's site about how to setup windowmaker to run mythtv
automatically:<br>
<a href="http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/windowmaker.txt">http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/windowmaker.txt</a><br>
<br>
I was inspired by the recent posts to the list about VNC and installed
x11vnc so i can control the xbox remotely. I used a package found at:<br>
<a href="http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/dries.ulyssis.org/fedora/fc4/i386/RPMS.dries/x11vnc-0.7.2-1.2.fc4.rf.i386.rpm">http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/dries.ulyssis.org/fedora/fc4/i386/RPMS.dries/x11vnc-0.7.2-1.2.fc4.rf.i386.rpm
</a><br>
<br>
<br>
Now the xbox loads X and mythtv automatically after a reboot. A few
configurations in mythfrontend and it looks like its working sweet. I
did most of this remotly after installing x11vnc so I haven't actually
tried to view any recorded video or tried watching tv but I'm pretty
optimistic. <br>
<br>
I hope this is helpful to other xbox frontend users.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>