[mythtv-users] FC5 to FC6 upgrade

Rich West Rich.West at wesmo.com
Thu Apr 26 16:50:54 UTC 2007


Greg Woods wrote:
> I'm currently running a backend under FC5 that has a PVR-500 and an HD
> Homerun for tuners. My basic question is about upgrading FC5 to FC6; can
> I do this with an upgrade or is it just as easy to do a complete
> reinstall? I am running SVN compiled from source if that makes a
> difference.
>
> There are two main reasons for wanting to upgrade: a minor one is that
> FC6 contains a driver for my HP722C printer that I would like to attach
> to this server so I can have a shared printer in the basement. The
> second and more important reason is that my experience with external
> FireWire disks is that FireWire works far better under FC6 than under
> FC5. I don't know for sure this would apply to getting FireWire from a
> DCT-6200 cable box, but I suspect it would. I have never been able to
> make this work under FC5; all I get is empty recordings (and yes, I've
> read the Wiki and past threads on this subject and I've tried every
> suggestion and procedure that I could find without any success). This is
> now a larger issue because, as has been discussed in a different thread,
> there are more channels available over FireWire than previously, and I
> might even be able to get a couple of key HD channels this way that are
> not available to my HD Homerun.
>
> Has anybody done an FC5 -> FC6 upgrade? How was it? Is it better to
> completely reinstall or do an upgrade? Did it help get FireWire working?

I literally *just* completed a FC5->FC6 upgrade this past weekend.  All
of my systems are x86-64 based.

I went through a bunch of baby steps before I actually did the backend
server.  I performed a straight upgrade on a my backup server, and that
took FOREVER (>90 minutes).  The result was that it worked, so I was
happy with that, but with the length of time it took, I felt I could
have installed the box from scratch, installed from atrpms, and
configured up the system in less time.

However, when I tested the upgrade process on my frontend test machine,
it hung half-way through.  I wasn't too happy with that.  So, I rebuilt
the test frontend machine with a fresh copy of FC6, did the minor
customizations to get it integrated in to my network, removed or
disabled any bogus extra packages (bluetooth, cups, & etc), installed
the mythtv packages from atrpms, and I was quite pleased with the
results.  My install size was down to 2.6GB for the frontend (from
nearly 5GB).  Since all of the configuration information is kept in the
database for MythTV, no changes were necessary on the frontend other
than just installing it and making sure it had the right hostname/ip.

With that done, I used that install as a base for all of my other
frontends.  I basically backed up all of my frontend systems and
replaced the installation with the one from my test system.  Of course,
I made some tweaks to each system, but you get the general idea.

After that was done and confirmed working (although my 2.5" to 3.5"
laptop drive adapter died on me in my test box when I was done), I
focused on upgrading my backend system.  This had the added complexity
of having everything on one drive, a configuration I wanted to get away
from.  I performed the same steps as I had done with the frontends to a
smaller drive (~40GB) to get a working FC6 install, and then I had to go
through some crazy steps to adjust the LVM volume group names (something
you probably won't have to do).  However, I essentially did the same
thing to my backend as I had done to my frontends by using the same
image and just adding a few extra packages (mythbackend, mythtv-setup, &
etc).


Unfortunately, I do not have HD set up (yet), so I cannot comment on the
firewire configuration.  I do have a firewire card in the box, but I am
not yet using it.

I hope this helps..
-Rich


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