[mythtv-users] Fwd: which new OS for old frontend?

[Greg Woods]

Seems weird to call a system that was in perfect working order a month
ago "old", but that's what I'm faced with. I had an ASUS Pundit-R
machine as a frontend (SD only) that had Fedora Core 5 on it and it was
working well. I had performed several SVN updates and all was well, but
the last one caused a display problem (flickering, unwatchable) that I
had no idea how to solve, and FC5 is pretty old now, I figured I'd start
over with a completely new system. No tuner cards to worry about,
shouldn't be that hard. But this has turned out to be a disastrous
mistake.

First I tried FC8; hopefully it will be longer before I have to do this
again if I start with the most recent OS. Got Myth working, LIRC
working, all looked good until I plugged it into my TV. Of course, dumb
ass; no TV out! Never thought of that. Never could get it working
either; dead end. This is a Radeon 9100 IGP built-in video chip. The
default radeon driver doesn't support TV out (yes, I tried "atitvout",
which after I ran it dutifully reported that the TV was enabled, but I
could see nothing on the TV once X started (the BIOS screen looked OK so
I can rule out bad cables or TV problems). I tried the ATI proprietary
driver, and got errors building the kernel module. Even after putting in
appropriate symlinks and hacking in a UTS_RELEASE definition in the
kernel include files so it would quit complaining about kernel version
mismatches, I still got compile errors trying to build the kernel
module. I'm no kernel hacker, so that was a dead end. I also tried
installing the ATI driver via RPM from Livna, but although it installed
and loaded fine, it failed to detect any devices, so X would not start.

The ATI driver page says they only support Red Hat Enterprise 4 in the
Red Hat flavor, so fine, I tried CentOS 4. This time I got wise and did
the TV out first. It worked, with the ATI driver. But now I can't get
LIRC to work. I get errors again trying to compile the kernel module (I
tried 0.6, 0.7 and 0.8 versions), and I have not been able to find any
RPMS that are compatible. Another dead end, at least for now.

Does anybody know how to make TV Out work on FC8 with this built-in
motherboard video chip, or how to get LIRC to compile on CentOS 4? Will
it work better with FC7 instead of FC8? Will the ATI driver build on
CentOS 5 even though it's not supported, and if so, are there LIRC
packages for CentOS 5? I suppose I could try Ubuntu, but I'm not as
familiar with Debian-based systems as I am with Red-Hat-based systems,
so this could be a big rat hole to go down.

The combination of TV out and LIRC has beaten me for anything more
recent than FC5.

Thanks for any advice,
--Greg