Installing MythTV on RHEL/CentOS

This is a collection of information to help set up MythTV on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS 5.2 machine.

Scope

Installing MythTV on RHEL/CentOS is nearly identical to Fedora. Being Fedora has well updated howto's this guide will note the differences in install MythTV on RHEL/CentOS instead of every step required in the process.

Why choose RHEL/CentOS

Fedora is one of the most popular and most supported in the Myth community. One of the major downfalls of Fedora is the life cycle is only ~6 months and packages are only updated for the two most recent releases. This means to stay on a supported OS you must upgrade or completely redo you Myth box every year. RHEL/CentOS gives you the advantage of using a OS that is nearly identical to Fedora yet supported for >6 years.

Choosing between RHEL or CentOS

RHEL is Red Hat's enterprise distribution. Generally used for servers that require long life cycles and stability. Based off the development of Fedora. RHEL is sold with support through Red Hat. While support is of great value many users of MythTV may be looking to save money and rely on the community for support. This is where CentOS comes in. Being, RHEL is based on GPL software Red Hat must release the source to the entire OS. CentOS takes the source, removes logo/trademarks of Red Hat and creates CentOS. CentOS is a 100% binary compatible with RHEL packages, so RPMs for EL are good for CentOS.

RHEL 5.x

Enabling DVB

As RHEL is designed for being an enterprise class operating system most of the DVB and v4l functionality is left out of the kernel to keep it minimalistic, free of clutter and to eliminate any possible issues with newly introduced modules. The centosplus kernel includes all needed v4l and DVB modules to work with most established tuner cards. To install:

su -  
yum update kernel --enablerepo=centosplus

It is strongly discouraged to enable the centosplus repo by default as there is a high likely hood of one of its packages conflicting with another core package/service. Ensure the centosplus kernel is loaded on boot by running either system-config-boot from the GNOME System->Administration menu or hand editing /boot/grub/grub.conf. After installation there should be no need to upgrade the kernel ever again unless a critical flaw is found, if it aint broke, don't fix it.

DVB should now be available.

Configuring Yum Repo's

QT 4.5

Starting with MythTV's subversion changeset 25232, MythTV requires Qt v4.5 to compile. Qt 4.5 RPMs for RHEL5/CentOS5 are available from pramberger.at. The following required packages can be found from various mirrors around the net or by going to the main pramberger.at site directly. Instructions for using the pramberger.at repository are available at: http://www.pramberger.at/peter/services/repository/

qt45-4.5.2-1.el5.pp.i386.rpm

qt45-config-4.5.2-1.el5.pp.i386.rpm

qt45-devel-4.5.2-1.el5.pp.i386.rpm

qt45-mysql-4.5.2-1.el5.pp.i386.rpm

PHP 5.3

If you are using Mythweb, you will also need to install PHP 5.3. Remi Collet has made them available at http://rpms.famillecollet.com/ as referenced on the CentOS repository page

i386: http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/remi/i386/repoview/php.html

x86_64: http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/remi/x86_64/repoview/php.html

ATRPMS.net

Note: CentOS 5 packages are not available for MythTV 0.24

Just like Fedora Axel provides great packages for RHEL/CentOS. To install the repo on i386 run:

rpm -i http://dl.atrpms.net/el5-i386/atrpms/stable/atrpms-package-config-120-3.el5.i386.rpm

For x86-64

rpm -i http://dl.atrpms.net/el5-x86_64/atrpms/stable/atrpms-package-config-120-3.el5.x86_64.rpm

You will also need to enable the testing repo to get the appropriate dependencies.

vim /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo

--cut--
#
# requires stable
#
[atrpms-testing]
name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - x86_64 - ATrpms testing
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/el5-x86_64/atrpms/testing
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
--cut--

Example i386 version of /etc/yum.repos.d/ATrpms.repo

[atrpms]
name=EL $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/el$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

[atrpms-testing]
name=EL $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms - ATrpms testing
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/el$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/testing
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1

RPM Forge

Although RPM Forge is not required for MythTV is provides many packages a home user may want.

EL5 i386:

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 / x86_64:

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

EPEL

EPEL was started because many Fedora contributors wanted to use the Fedora packages they maintain on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible derivatives.

To install for both i386 and x86-64

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Compiling MythTV 0.24 from source

On CentOS 5, you can compile MythTV 0.24 from source with some additional steps:

1. Make sure you have the video4linux-devel, kernel-devel, and kernel-headers packages from ATrpms and CentOS installed
2. Add the --dvb-path=/usr/include/v4l line to your configure script to use the video4linux headers
3. Create a symbolic link from the kernel sources compile.h to your include directory using:

ln -s /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`/include/linux/compiler.h /usr/include/linux/compiler.h

There will also be issues with Python because the Python version shipped with CentOS is older than what MythTV requires. This section should be updated with more detailed information on workarounds for that issue.

Continue

From this point the differences between Fedora and RHEL/CentOS are extremely Trival. Continue your install from the Fedora page

RHEL 6.x

Installing MythTV on RHEL6 can be done from the ATRPMS Repos. I wrote a guide here.