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Moving a MythTV Master backend

This proved to be a whole lot easier than I thought. It required backing up the mythconverg MySQL database on the old system and restoring it on the new one.

   ~ /usr/share/mythtv/mythconverg_backup.pl
   ~ /usr/share/mythtv/mythconverg_restore.pl --filename mythconverg-VERSION-TIMESTAMP.sql.gz

A further step was needed to update the hostname of existing recordings to the new host.

   mysql> update 'recorded' set hostname='peeves' where hostname<>'peeves'

This machine became the frontend at the same time. The i3 GPU support was included in the xf86-video-intel driver from version 2.10. I ended up using 2.11 which had just become available and added the following entry to /etc/portage/package.keywords.

   =x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.11.0 ~x86

posted by James Gemmell on Sun, 29 Aug 2010 at 12:13 | permalink | tags: gentoo, linux, mythtv

Building a new Gentoo MythTV backend

After a few of years of fairly intensive use I am migrating a MythTV backend from a rather creaky and increasingly unstable Pentium 4 to a shiny new Core i3 530 based box. I was quite impressed with Phoronix's Linux benchmarks of the CPU. The performance of the integrated GPU will help too since this box is destined to run an HD frontend at some point.

It's been a while since I last set up a Gentoo box from scratch and thought I'd give the Gentoo Quick Install a go rather than the LiveCD. The i3's Hyper-Threading support meant that the boot was graced with a 4 penguin salute and I was pleasantly surprised by the performance.

When partitioning the 1TB drive I settled on the following layout, setting aside /dev/sda5 as a future amd64 root partition.

   /dev/sda1	/boot		256MB	ext2
   /dev/sda2	swap		2GB	swap
   /dev/sda3	/		100GB	ext3
   /dev/sda5	[amd64]		100GB	ext3
   /dev/sda6	/mnt/mythtv	729GB	xfs

I diverged from the install guide in a few places. When the gentoo-sources kernel download threatened to take more than a couple of hours I performed the mirror-select step early and portage pulled it from a local mirror. I prefer using genkernel and, setting MAKEOPTS="-j5", this and the emerge world steps took next to no time.

The backend is now up and recording and the next step is to promote it to master backend status and get the frontend working.

posted by James Gemmell on Tue, 20 Apr 2010 at 09:17 | permalink | tags: gentoo, linux, mythtv

Upgrading Gentoo MythTV to 0.22

I recently upgraded a frontend to Mythbuntu 9.10 and got MythTV 0.22 as part of the deal. Rather than leap through the fiery hoops required to revert it back to 0.21 I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my other Gentoo-based MythTV backend and frontends to 0.22.

This was trouble free as upgrades go but I did encounter the UTF8/latin1 database encoding problem which requires a backup and restore of the MythTV database after changing the default encoding to latin1. Changing the MySQL server configuration is easy to do on Gentoo as all that is required is to rebuild MySQL with the latin1 USE flag.

My package.keywords now looks as follows;

   >=media-tv/mythtv-0.22 ~x86
   >=media-plugins/mythcontrols-0.22 ~x86
   >=media-plugins/mythgallery-0.22 ~x86
   >=media-plugins/mythmusic-0.22 ~x86
   >=media-plugins/mythvideo-0.22 ~x86
   >=www-apps/mythweb-0.22 ~x86
   >=dev-python/imdbpy-3.8 ~x86
   >=x11-themes/mythtv-themes-0.22 ~x86
   >=x11-themes/mythtv-themes-extra-0.22 ~x86

and my package.use has;

   dev-db/mysql latin1

posted by James Gemmell on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 at 10:36 | permalink | tags: gentoo, linux, mythtv

DTV1000S Linux driver now working

Top of my todo list for some time now has been to get my Leadtek WinFast DTV1000S DVB-T capture card to pay its way on a Gentoo MythTV backend instead of gathering dust on the shelf.

Video4Linux (V4L) drivers exist for the individual DTV1000S components listed below as they have also been used in other DVB cards.

TDA18271 - terrestrial / cable silicon tuner
TDA10048 - channel decoder/demodulator
SAA7130 - PCI video broadcast decoder

What was lacking was the support for the card. I made an unsuccessful attempt at putting it together at the beginning of the year. Now Michael Krufky has done all the heavy lifting and committed his changes.

The easiest way to incorporate these into the 2.6.30-r8 kernel was to follow the V4L build instructions. Revision 13263 has all the necessary changes.

hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb
cd v4l-dvb
make
sudo make install

I've not tested the IR capabilities of the DTV1000S as I'm using an AverTV DVB-T 777 for that purpose.

I used Steven Toth's instructions to get the TDA10048 firmware drivers from http://steventoth.net/linux/hvr1700/ and followed the readme.txt. Hat tip to Terry for his Leadtek product page.

posted by James Gemmell on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 at 10:17 | permalink | tags: gentoo, linux, mythtv

Gentoo Linux on the Dell Latitude C400

This guide started off some time after I upgraded the 10Gb drive on the C400 to an 80Gb Hitachi and replaced the Debian installation. Gentoo has a wealth of documentation so this is intended as an installation specific supplement.

Disclaimer: This document comes with no guarantees. The steps I followed worked for me but may not necessarily work for you or your hardware.

Configuration

Gentoo: linux-2.6.18-suspend2-r1 kernel
no Windows installation
PIII-M 866MHz CPU: 768 Mb RAM (256Mb + 512Mb)
A12 BIOS
Crystal 4205 audio
3c905C-TX FastEthernet adapter (built-in)
80Gb 5400rpm Hitachi 5K80
TrueMobile 1150 wireless (disabled): Netgear MA401 PCMCIA adapter
Netgear WAG511 PCMCIA adapter

Post-install

genkernel

Thinking the genkernel built kernels to be a little bloated I resorted to using the more traditional make menuconfig and make bzlilo. After much fiddling, recompiling & rebooting every time I needed another driver it was time to give genkernel another shot. I was pleasantly surprised - it actually built most of what I needed! I'm now a genkernel convert.

Sun, 29 Aug 2010

Moving a MythTV Master backend

Tue, 20 Apr 2010