[mythtv-users] Mythtv 31 on a Zotac Ion

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 13 Aug 2020 12:57:35 +0100, you wrote:

>The SSD on my ancient standalone Myth box failed last night.
>
>It was a combined frontend / backend running Myth 25 on Fedora 16.  Once I
>got multirec and DVB-T HD working I didn't see the need to upgrade!
>
>Recordings were on a separate drive and I have database backups but I've
>decided to do a clean install.
>
>I just wanted to ask if anyone has an opinion on whether v31 will still run
>on that hardware.  Initial impressions aren't good.
>
>Last night I installed lubuntu on an old 2.5inch spinning laptop drive I
>had lying around and installed myth from the repo.
>
>The GUI was freezing when recording HD.
>
>Now I didn't investigate at all and I was recording to the same old laptop
>drive as I put the OS on so there's much I can improve.
>
>I've ordered a new SSD and i'll be recording to external drives again.
>
>i'd just like to know if I'm wasting my time on that hardware - and would
>compiling from source give me a system better tailored to my hardware?
>
>
>Thanks in advance
>
>David

How much RAM does it have?  Linux distros have been growing over the
last few years and the standard ones are typically not comfortable in
2 Gibytes any more.  But MythTV is still fine in 4 Gibytes, unless you
have a monster database.  Having the GUI freezing may simply be
because old 2.5" laptop drives are very slow, even compared to modern
spinning drives, let alone SSDs.  And laptop drives are optimised to
stop rotating at the slightest chance, so if it had to start again,
the delay for that would be significant.  My mother was running
Xubuntu 18.04 and MythTV v30 on a 2009 Gigabyte motherboard with 4
Gibytes of RAM and it was fine unless she also ran Firefox and
Thunderbird, which made it swap a little bit.  I only had to upgrade
her PC a couple of weeks ago because it started to do CPU thermal
shutdowns when she played a recording for more than an hour.

Your Ion was fine before, and so as long as it has at least 4 Gibytes
of RAM it should still be good.  If it only has 2 Gibytes, then you
may need to use one of the special distros that are less resource
hungry.