[mythtv-users] Installed and Working

[Jason James]

I just got MythTV working last night. I want to thank
everyone working on this project; it's truly awesome
and a testament to the power of the
open-souce/free-software development community.

The docs in particular are worth special kudos. They
made everything so much easier. I basically followed
them to the letter, except I used apt-get and
freshrpms (and xmltv from Axel Thimm) whenever
possible. I also installed alsa from freshrpms to get
sound working.

To the guy who keeps getting seg faults when running
mythfilldatabase, I was also getting this problem. I
upgraded to CVS and the problem stopped.

It took awhile to get to this point for the reasons
often mentioned on this list: hardware troubles. My
first attempt was with a P3/460 processor and an ATI
AIW card. After reading the lists, I knew I had to get
a different card. I was feeling too cheap to upgrade
the mobo and CPU, so I bought a Matrox G200 TV. This
didn't work much better, though I was able to get TV
watching working with Zapping and recording with
WebVCRPlus.

I finally sucked it up and bought a WinTV and a new
CPU/mobo. My goal was something fast, reliable and
well supported under Linux/MythTV. I mostly got what I
wanted, except for one blunder (detailed in a rant
below). 

Here is my current hw list:

AMD Athlon XP 2100+
256MB DDR
80GB Seagate Barricuda (so quiet!)
Asus A7N266-VM motherboard (with Nforce and GeForce2
MX)
WinTV PCI (model 404 with IRC)
RedHat 8.0

<rant> NVIDIA sucks for Linux. The only thing I would
avoid is the Nforce chipset and the GeForce. It's a
total pain to install and (I'm sure) will be a total
pain to maintain for a very simple reason: no GPL'ed
drivers. 

As long as NVIDIA is stuck in the dark ages, I will
never use or recommend their gear again. RH8 is so
easy to install, it has autodetected nearly every
piece of hardware I've ever had, but there is nothing
it can do with NVIDIA's binary only drivers. NVIDIA's
drivers have to be downloaded and installed from their
website rather than included in the distro. The entire
RH install process was ugly and lengthy because of
NVIDIA. Typically, RH8 gets X working perfectly right
out of the box, but with this NVIDIA chipset, it took
hours to get the Geforce and my mouse working
properly.

And then guess what, the performance totally sucked!
The screen redraw was incredibly slow. Only by
downloading and rebuilding the source RPMs was I able
to get good performance.

And now that it's working, everytime I upgrade my
kernel, which will probably be fairly often since
there are frequent security updates, since RH 8.1 will
be out soon, since I don't have LIRC working yet, I
will have to go through a bunch of extra steps:
--switch to runlevel 3
--reboot with new kernel
--rebuild the NVIDIA drivers for the nforce and
geforce and install them
--reboot and make sure it works
--switch back to runlevel 5

It isn't worth it to me to go through all of this just
for a new kernel. I'll never use NVIDIA again. </rant>

Again, thanks to everyone for making MythTV such a
great project. I'll keep pestering with questions and
try to offer my experiences if they seem helpful.

./jj

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