[mythtv-users] Notes about .15 upgrade on Fedora Core 2 (FC2)

[Michael D. Cencula]

Howdy folks,

This posting is primarily for the archives in case others are having some of 
these same problems.

I recently upgraded to mythtv .15 on FC2 using Axels rpms and thought I would 
post a few notes about some difficulties I had in case it saves someone some 
trouble.

The documentation about how to switch over to DataDirect was excellent.  It 
mentioned that you should say "yes" to the question:

Would you like to clear all program/channel
settings before starting configuration?

...but I also found I had to answer "yes" to this question also:

Would you like to clear all capture card
settings before starting configuration?

-------------------

Regarding using a Matrox G400 for TVout:

There's a bug with the matroxfb_maven module that ships with the stock FC2 
kernel: 

kernel-2.6.5-1.358.i686.rpm

It gives a Segmentation Fault when loading this module.  If you try again, it 
looks like it works (no error this time), but cat /proc/modules shows it as 
"Loading" instead of "Live".  Continuing past this and trying to run 
matroxset will give the error:

ioctl failed: Device or resource busy

...so I had to upgrade to the latest update for FC2:

kernel-2.6.6-1.427.i686.rpm 

Also, some programs that were previously part of the MPlayer packages are no 
longer included.  Specifically, matroxset and fbset are not included.  I 
simply worked around it by downloading Axel's .src.rpm, installed it, 
unpacked the tarball, changed to the TVout directory and ran make.  I think I 
had to issue a ./configure from the base directory to generate the Makefiles, 
but I'm can't remember for sure.  I installed the programs in /usr/sbin.

And, of course, you'll want to get maven (I renamed it to maven-prog) to set 
some of the registers in the maven chipset on your Matrox card:

http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/~vana/ftp/pub/linux/matrox-latest/maven-prog.tgz

Since my "myth" user that I run mythtv as doesn't have root permissions, I 
wasn't able to run the fbset, matroxset, and maven-prog programs.  So I 
issued chmod a+s /usr/sbin/fbset /usr/sbin/matroxset /usr/sbin/maven-prog to 
work around it.  Perhaps I would have been better off changing the 
permissions on the /dev/fb* devices instead, but what I did works for me.

-------------------

lirc:

I had to enable the bleeding packages from ATrpms by adding the following 
line:

rpm             http://apt.physik.fu-berlin.de fedora/2/en/i386 at-bleeding

...to /etc/apt/sources.list

and the packages to download are:

lirc-0.7.0-34_cvs20040523.rhfc2.at
kernel-module-lirc-2.6.6-1.427-0.7.0-34_cvs20040523.rhfc2.at
lirc-lib-0.7.0-34_cvs20040523.rhfc2.at

So, that gets everything you need for lirc.  Of course you'll have to create 
a /etc/lircd.conf file and also a .lircrc file.  Yes, yes I know mythtv has 
built-in lirc support...maybe one of these days I'll use it.  Running 
chkconfig lircd on is probably a good idea, too.

One additional problem I had was getting the lirc_serial module to load.  It 
turns out, the kernel has serial support built-in, so you need to issue the 
following line before lirc_serial will load:

setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none

Of course, if you're not using a homebrew serial receiver, or have it on some 
other port than /dev/ttyS0, you should modify that accordingly.

-------------------

btaudio / ALSA

Well, I *had* been happily using btaudio with my three Hauppauge WinTV-radio 
with dbx stereo cards prior to this upgrade.  I was having a dickens of a 
time getting btaudio to work because of the following problems:

1. btaudio doesn't come with the stock FC2 kernel.  So I recompiled a kernel 
with it enabled.
2. My m/b (a Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra) has a Via 8233 audio chipset on it.  Well, 
I discovered a while back (perhaps in mythtv .11 or .12 days) that the oss 
sound driver for that chipset is broken, so ALSA is required.
3. using btaudio for all my capture cards and ALSA for my onboard sound chip 
wasn't working.  Specifically, I wanted to load the btaudio modules first and 
the Via 8233 driver last.  That way, /dev/dsp0 would match 
with /dev/video0, /dev/dsp1 would match with /dev/video1, etc and /dev/dsp3 
would be for the output.  Pretty anal, huh?  That's me. ;-)

Anyway, after screwing with this for a while, I discovered that btaudio isn't 
necessary at all since ALSA has a module that does the same thing.  It's 
called snd_bt87x.  Pretty cool.  So after acclimating myself to the new 
modprobe.conf format (which is *way* more flexible than the old modules.conf 
format), I had all the sound and video modules set up the way I wanted.

Lastly, the default mixer settings for my via-8233 chip were all muted or set 
to zero volume.  I used alsamixer to crank them up / unmute them and issued:

/usr/sbin/alsactl store 3

...to save them.  Of course, if you have less than 4 alsa cards, you'll use a 
different card # than 3.

-------------------

KDE autostart

I've been using KDE as my window manager since back in the .7 days and it's 
worked out very well.  Here's what I had to do to get it working this time:

Add the line:

DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"

to the file:

/etc/sysconfig/desktop

that way, FC2 will use the kdm login manger instead of the gdm login manager 
which is the default for FC2.

Launch kcontrol and go to System Administration -> Login Manager -> 
Convenience and select Automatic Login, Password-Less login, Automatically 
login again after X server crash, and also select the user to login as.

This all looked good, but there's a file missing for KDE autologin in FC2.  
There should be a file called /etc/pam.d/kde-np, but there isn't.  To fix 
that, just make a copy of gdm-autologin to the name kde-np and you should be 
good to go.

-------------------

Here's a few of my config files in case it'll help anyone out in the future:

/etc/modprobe.conf:

alias eth0 8139too
alias snd-card-0 snd-bt87x
install snd-bt87x /etc/setupmultimedia
alias char-major-81 bttv
alias usb-controller ehci-hcd
alias usb-controller1 uhci-hcd
alias char-major-61 lirc_serial

-------

/etc/setupmultimedia (root.root and 755):

/sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-bt87x
/sbin/modprobe snd-pcm-oss
/sbin/modprobe snd-via82xx && /usr/sbin/alsactl restore 3 >/dev/null 2>&1 || :

-------

/sbin/mythstartup (root.root and 755):

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/irxevent &
/usr/bin/irexec &
/usr/sbin/matroxset -f /dev/fb1 -m 0
/usr/sbin/matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -m 3
/usr/sbin/matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -o 1 2

/usr/sbin/fbset -fb /dev/fb0 -left 30 -right 0 -lower 40 -upper 80 -hslen 30

# Set the black level
/usr/sbin/maven-prog 0x0e 0x44

# Set the white level
/usr/sbin/maven-prog 0x1e 0x9f

# Set the color
/usr/sbin/maven-prog 0x20 0x60

# Set the hue
/usr/sbin/maven-prog 0x22 0x90

/usr/bin/mythbackend &
/bin/sleep 15
/usr/bin/mythfrontend &

-------

/etc/rc.d/rc.local:

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don't
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.

touch /var/lock/subsys/local
setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none
modprobe lirc_serial
/etc/rc.d/setupframebuffer

-------

/etc/rc.d/setupframebuffer (root.root and 755):

modprobe i2c-matroxfb
modprobe matroxfb_crtc2
modprobe matroxfb_maven



Best of luck,

Mike Cencula