[mythtv-users] Total System lock [SOLVED]

[Garry Gibson]

Whilst I'm in slight danger of speaking too soon, or jinxing myself
here, I thought I'd share something may help others I've seen with
similar issues.

The problem

When doing anything full screen video related, my combined
frontend/backend machine would lock up. No ssh, no ctrl+alt+backspace,
no shouting "hellooooo" etc. The only choice was to hit the power
button.

Funny thing was, if I used a seperate 'frontend' machine and pointed
it at the backend, it worked ok.

Another symptom, was no errors logged anywhere. I gave up and reverted
to 0.15 and all was well...

The remedy

It seems that in 0.16, running mythfrontend with a UID of 0 kills it
dead when viewing video. Insta-death.

As my setup was running it as root (calm down, I've already explained
myself in previous posts!), this meant it was always going to crash
and burn.

I simply created another user, got jiggy with the appropriate
permissions on /dsp/dev xhost etc, and it works perfectly. I lose out
on the dynamic scheduling which is a shame as live TV isn't as smooth
as I'd like, but I have my Myth back.

(when I ran the frontend from another machine, I was doing it from my
desktop and therefore not as root)

For reference, my machine is a Pundit(original), 2.4.20 kernel, SuSE
8.something, KDE 3.1, PVR-250

Anyway, hope this helps someone out there...

-Garry