[mythtv-users] Jarrod's Guide for Debian?

[Jim Southard]

OK, I'm very new at MythTV, so be gentle....

Is there something like Jarrod's great Fedora guide for for getting 
MythTV running on Debian? I'd especially like to find a step-by-step 
guide that explains the Matt Zimmerman deb's and how to get them set up 
with IvyTV drivers and PVR-350 TV out.

I'm a moderate novice at Linux. Just playing around, I've successfully 
installed and set up most of the major Linux distros on a variety of 
hardware (Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, SuSE, and even Gentoo, plus a few 
others). I've decided that I like Debian the best, for a variety of 
arguable reasons (I'm really hooked on APT and dist-upgrade). I still 
spend almost all of my "normal" computer time in Windows, however, so 
I'm by no means Linux-literate.

I'm trying to get MythTV to work on Debian unstable using a Hauppauge 
PVR-350 and the Matt Zimmerman deb's at 
http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu:8088/~mdz/debian/dists/unstable/mythtv/. My 
first and major struggle was getting IvyTV drivers to compile, but I 
finally got that straightened out after updating the kernel to 2.4.25 
and getting the header and source files.

But now, I'm somewhat lost in trying to get the Hauppauge grey remote to 
work, and for some reason the MythTV backend refuses to run correctly. 
I'm also really confused by the way the Matt Zimmerman packages set up 
the 'mythtv' user and associated setuid and permissions, and how I'm 
supposed to run MythTV in that environment. After changing a bunch of 
stuff I think things are now FUBAR, so I'm going to start over.

I'm not expecting answers to these issues (I know I've been too vague). 
What I really want to do at this point is start over with a clean 
reinstall of Debian unstable, and carefully and correctly take it step 
by step.

Based on the collective wisdom here, should I switch to Fedora just so I 
have a good guide to follow? Or can I find good help on Debian?