[mythtv-users] Success! FC3/0.18 upgrade to CentOS5/0.20.2

Graham TerMarsch mythtv at howlingfrog.com
Sun Sep 16 18:49:00 UTC 2007


Wanted to send a note to say "Thanks!" and "Wow!" to everyone who's been 
involved in the recent work with Schedules Direct.  I upgraded my aging 
FC3/0.18 machine last night to CentOS5/0.20.2 and it went -perfectly- 
smoothly.  No hiccups, no unexpected gotchas, nothing.

I'd been dreading the upgrade as I was sure that I'd run into -something- 
that'd go wrong or completely monkey up the works.  I'm running MythTV on 
some older h/w and considering how long its been since I last touched any of 
the s/w I was expecting it to be much more painful than it was.

[unless you're interested in reading about the upgrade, you can stop here]

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Hardware-wise, here's what I'm working with:
- AMD Duron 700Mhz
- 640MB RAM
- 2x Hauppauge PVR 250
- 1x Hauppauge PVR 150
- nVidia Geforce4 MX4000 (S-Video)

Software-wise, this is what I started with:
- Fedora Core 3
- MythTV 0.18
- IVTV 0.40, with a custom patch to normalize volumes across all three PVR 
boards (back then IVTV gave me different volumes for the 250 vs 150, and I 
needed them to be the same)
- nVidia 7676 series driver

My plan was to re-install the OS with CentOS5, restore my old MythTV database, 
and then let the DB get auto-updated as an upgrade when I fired up MythTV the 
first time.  Sounds simple enough, but would it be...

Turned out, it -WAS- that simple.  In fact, I spent more time figuring out 
which nVidia driver I needed to have installed for my gfx card then I did 
fighting with things.

I loosely followed the instructions in Jarod's guide, but used CentOS5 instead 
of Fedora for the OS (I know I'm -not- going to be doing any regular updates 
to this box, so knowing that the platform is going to be around for more than 
6mos was important).

Fired up the install DVD, reformatted the OS partitions, and installed a fresh 
copy of CentOS65 on the machine.  Then, set up ATrpms, and proceeded to 
install the nVidia drivers, IVTV drivers, LIRCd, and MythTV (in that order).  
I did run into a glitch when installing MythTV in that Yum couldn't find an 
RPM to satisfy the "PIL" dependency for mytharchive, so I cherry-picked the 
MythTV packages/plug-ins I wanted and installed just those.  Driver-wise, 
though, I didn't have a -single- hiccup.  No muss, no fuss, no twiddling with 
driver settings in "modprobe.conf" or trying to remember what crazy-ass tuner 
setting I needed to set up for each card.. it -just-worked-.  Volumes were 
normalized across the PVR boards, LIRC auto-detected the IR remotes on the 
PVRs, and the nVidia drivers went in without a hitch (GL and XvMC even work, 
or at least don't crash the machine any more).

Now, the scary part... I manually created the MythTV DB from the SQL 
in "mc.sql", then restored a dump of my old MythTV database.  Crossed my 
fingers, and fired up "mythtv-setup"... and it worked.  DB got updated 
automatically.  Yay!  Our recording history would be preserved!

Signed up for Schedules Direct, and set that into MythTV.  This was by far 
the -easiest- step.  Easier, in fact, then it was when it was Zap2It; the SD 
website was easy to work with, and the integration right into MythTV made it 
a piece of cake.  Fired up "mythfilldatabase", configured things to 
auto-start at boot like I had before, and restarted the machine.

Machine fired up, and there it was... MythTV 0.20.  Dropped in some DVDs that 
I knew were problematic previously when viewed w/Xine (thanks Disney), and 
they all worked like a charm with MythTVs "Internal" DVD player.

End results:
- CentOS 5
- MythTV 0.20.2
- IVTV 0.10.5
- nVidia 9629 series driver

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Oh, I'm a happy camper...

I was honestly expecting -something- to go wrong and to end up having to spend 
hours and hours Googling to find answers to specific driver issues or setup 
problems I'd have (like I did 3yrs ago when I set up 0.18).  None.  Nada.  
Zilch.  Stuff just worked the way it was supposed to, and didn't need any 
extra fiddling or twiddling to get it set up on the hardware.

I'm sure I'll spend the next few days twiddling settings and trying out new 
features, but I'll rest easier knowing that when the new seasons start next 
week my wife's shows will all get recorded again.

Thanks Isaac!  Thanks Hans!  And thanks to -everyone- else who's been involved 
in making MythTV and Schedules Direct work this smoothly.

-- 
Graham TerMarsch


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