[mythtv-users] Total System lock [SOLVED]

[Mercury Morris]

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:18:04 +0000, Garry Gibson <garry.gibson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

Thanks for the interesting discovery.  Although I have been
tempted to just use root for everything to save time, etc.,
I won't be doing that, thanks to your post.

One question: What exactly is "dynamic scheduling"?
I searched the archive for it, but nothing meaningful
came up.

Thanks.

--
MM