[mythtv-users] service mythbackend start fails - HOME env variable

[Calvin Dodge]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Mike LaPlante <mike at dividia.net> wrote:
> This may be Fedora specific, and maybe better asked on the ATrpms list.
>  But I get this message in mythbackend.log when I run 'service
>  mythbackend start'
>
>  2008-02-21 11:51:59.650 Cannot locate your home directory. Please set
>  the environment variable HOME or MYTHCONFDIR
>
>  Everything works fine if I run as the mythtv user. So I'm wonder if the
>  problem is with the init.d file that starts up the backend.

Apparently the backend program expects $HOME to be set to the "mythtv"
user's home directory. "service" passes a limited number of
environment variables to the service it's starting, and HOME isn't one
of them.

I used to edit that init.d script to explicitly set HOME, but it got
wiped out by every mythtv upgrade.

Finally after, running mythtv-setup as root, I copied /root/.mythtv to
the root directory (i.e., "/.mythtv"). I've had no such problem with
the backend since then.

Calvin