[mythtv-users] Migrating ATI -> NVidia

[Arthur Green]

Having spent considerable time wrestling with fglrx, I've finally thrown 
in the towel and installed a combined FE/BE using an NVidia 7000-series 
card(a Shuttle with onboard NVidia graphics). The previous system had an 
ATI X1200. Installation and configuration was a doddle compared with the 
ATI system - no wrangling Xorg.conf and aticonfig, no tussling with 
interlacing. The ATI system would grind to a halt every few minutes with 
the dreaded "NVP: Timed out waiting for free video buffers" message 
during playback or live TV.

The migration from an ATI-based machine to NVidia (including OS and 
MythTV installation, copying 80+ GB of content, configuration and 
testing) took about 10 hours, with much of that being taken up with an 
overnight copying of recorded content. The really nice thing was being 
able to install the NVidia drivers and MythTV, setup MythTV and start 
the front end for the first time and be able to watch TV without having 
to spend a week fiddling with the X server configuration.

I also took the opportunity to move to Fedora 9 on the new system, and 
pretty much all the snags I hit were to do with KDE4. It was the first 
time I'd seen KDE4 and I have to admit it takes a bit of getting used 
to. It's a huge change from KDE3.x (which is what I've been using on 
Linux systems for several years). I still can't figure out how to shut 
off the stupid login and logout music - KDE4 doesn't seem to have any 
way to configure that. The GUI for auto-login is also broken, so I ended 
up manually editing the gdm configuration.

So - MythTV with an NVidia graphics card gets a big thumbs-up, but KDE4 
is something of a shock to the system.

  - Arthur