Installing MythTV on Vector

From MythTV

As my 1st attempt at Wiki entry, this may be a little rough around the edges. The same goes for the install on Vector Linux.

Looking for a slim Linux distro to install and run MythTv on a minimal system, we stumbled across Vector 5.1 Standard. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles some other distros have and the download is only about a 390 MB ISO.

The PC hardware is:

Epox MVP3 Socket 7 with 1 Mb L2 AMD K6-2 500 Mhz 384Mb Sdram Happuage WinTv Model # 401 Some spare PCI Sound Card ( gamix reports a C-Media PCI CMI8736 (model37)) IBM Deskstar 14.4 Gb IDE ( old & slow by todays standards )

1st thing was booting with a DOS disk and zero filling the hard drive. 2nd was booting from CD and dropping out of the install to the Linux shell ( menu option ) and running 'fdisk' to write a partition file on a "new disk" 3rd was booting from CD and selecting the partition menu item to create root, swap, and home partitions. 4th another reboot and proceed with install ( during partition selection, select 'home' option and reiserfs as format, it defaults the swap partition, and for 'root' select reiserfs again ). Somewhere I ran across a note that selecting EXT3 caused odd error in that the ext3 file system module wasn't included in the booted kernel. This will take a little while to format and copy all the files to your hard drive. After this there are several menu driven items to finish selection of time zone, mouse, video mode, etc.

Once you have Vector installed, you will need to obtain 5 other packages ( lame, Freetype, MySql, QT & MythTv ). I used 'vlapt-get' to obtain packages initially until I found a reference that it was no longer able to determine all dependancies for packages and one should now use 'slapt-get'.

My usage was as follows:

"vlapt" to deselect the 'favorite' mirror & select a Slackware 10.1 mirror. "slapt-get --update" to obtain available packages. "slapt-get --install QT" should install QT 3.3.3-i486-3 "slapt-get --install MySql" should install MySql 4.0.23A-i486-1 "vlapt" to select one of the mirrors in either the 'favorite' or 'Vector' sections "slapt-get --update" to obtain available packages from Vector mirror "slapt-get --install freetype" should install Freetype 2.1.10-i586-4

Use Firefox or Dillo included web browsers to download 'lame (3.96.1) ' and 'MythTv' tar files.

Export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt Export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/qt

Lame ./configure, make & make install didn't take very long at all. MythTv ./configure, qmake mythtv.pro, make qmake, make & make install took quite a while ( over 5 hours - it is much quicker on a Duron 2000+ ).

Used 'mc' ( Midnight Commander included ) to edit "/etc/ld.so.conf" ( ldconfig libraries file ) to include "/usr/lib/qt/plugins/sqldrivers"

'mysql_install_db' created initial mysql database. It is still a little fuzzy here as to what actually needs to happen. Attempting to start 'mysqld_safe' gets a error about host table not found or similiar ( we encountered several different errors tinkering in this area ). The 'chown mysql.mysql /var/lib/mysql' ; then 'chown mysql.mysql /var/lib/mysql/mysql' and finally 'chown mysql.mysql /var/lib/mysql/mysql/*' seems to be working here. After that 'mysqld_safe &' had mysqld running in the background.

Delete last line in mc.sql as MySql < 4.1 doesn't have syntax for default character set.

'mysql < mc.sql' while in the mythtv database directory

'amixer set Line,0 75%,75% mute captur' ( note missing 'e' on capture - don't ask me why )

'amixer cset iface=MIXER,name=CaptureSource' 4,4' ( corrects a bug in ALSA where left audio channel is captured from line-in and right audio channel is captured from aux-in ) Your sound card may use 3,3 check the resulting display for exact number to use.

'modprobe bttv' then 'modprobe snd_bt87x' ( this last bit finally fixed the live audio problem )

'mythtv-setup' we defaulted to almost everything ( haven't suscribed to DataDirect yet, but put them in to scan channels as it didn't seem to want to scan for channels without an entry ).

'mythbackend &' and we wait until the "Seems to woken by user" message (or similiar) appears.

'mythfrontend' and we watchTv or record and watch later :-)

This platform may be a little underpowered still but top shows 70% to 79% CPU and we haven't used any swap space.