[mythtv-users] My MythTV journey

[Jarod C. Wilson]

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On Tuesday 23 December 2003 10:00, Brian Scully wrote:
> It has taken me about a month (@10-20 hours/wk) of work to get MythTV up
> and running.  You will notice that I made my life a little hard in the
> choices I made - so don't be put off by this number.  You also may decide
> that i'm an idiot after reading this post - so be it.  But hopefully I can
> share something useful with the readers of this list.  First my hardware:
>
> Mobo: Abit NF7-S 2.0 ( NForce2 - first mistake )

nForce2 works great here.

> Vid Card: ASUS V9520 Video Suite:
>  2x DVI out, TV-out, TV-in (non functional ... yet), Nvidia FX5200 chip (
> second mistake )

No problems with any of my 7 nVidia cards, an FX 5200 works fine for many 
people (sans-TV-in)...

> Software:
> Distribution: Debian testing/unstable current ( third mistake )
> Kernel: 2.6.0-test11-bk5-bart1 + forcedeth patch + forcedeth-update-2 patch
> (fourth mistake) Vid driver: NVIDIA binary 4620 + minion.de. patches

I'm rather partial to Red Hat's kernels, which have all the APIC stuff already 
disabled, so its a non-issue.

> Some recommendations based upon my experiences:
> * Some people tell you that 256MB is enough.  top tells me that I am using
> all but 4-5MB of my 512MB of RAM.  I've got about 12MB in swap too.  Get
> plenty of RAM.

Linux will use up as much as your memory as it can. 512MB is plenty. I'm 
sitting at a dual Athlon system with 1.5GB of RAM, not doing a huge amount of 
stuff, and there isn't a huge amount of RAM "free". Everything gets cached to 
memory for max performance. Again, 512MB is plenty (though I do recommend 
more than 256MB, to avoid swapping). You aren't short on memory.

> * Stay away from nforce boards

I disagree. That has to be qualified. Stay away from nForce boards if you 
aren't experienced and won't be installing Fedora/Red Hat. Otherwise, they 
work quite well. I patched absolutely nothing to get mine working, first 
under Red Hat Linux 9, now under Fedora Core.

> * Run a 2.4 kernel

For now, yes.

> * Upgrade X as far as is reasonable

If reasonable means the latest stable version, I agree. (Speaking strictly 
about nForce boards).

> * Don't use twm or fvwm as your window manager (the whole window
> positioning thing is a pita) - I like fluxbox, it sticks the window
> somewhere on the screen w/o my intervention * Try knoppmyth before debian
> if you're not well seasoned, or coming from RedHat/SuSE like me

If you were coming from Red Hat/SuSE, why didn't you stick to one of those? My 
recommendation is generally to use whatever you're most comfortable with (as 
long as it isn't Windows :).

- -- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

Got a question? Read this first...
     http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
MythTV, Fedora Core & ATrpms documentation:
     http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/
MythTV Searchable Mailing List Archive
     http://www.gossamer-threads.com/archive/MythTV_C2/
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