Installing MythTV on Debian Etch

This is a Tutorial to installing MythTV on a new installed Debian ETCH Machine.

Debian Install

Download the netinst disk.

1. Insert the Debian CD in the CD/DVD drive
2. Reboot the target PC by pressing its reset button
3. At the Debian Boot Screen, hit enter
4. Choose language, Country or Region, Keyboard Layout
5. Choose a servername and domain.
6. Accept automatic partition changes
7. Install GRUB to the MBR
8. Reboot
9. Debian start its post install configuration routine
10. For Time Zone, I chose Eastern
11. IMPORTANT: do not use the username "mythtv". The user "mythtv" is reserved for use by mythtv
12. Enter your new root password and a new user account,
13. Add ftp.debian.org
14. Keep Desktop, Add Web Server, SQL Server, & File Server
15. Configure the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) by accepting the default settings
16. The Debian Netinst installer should now leave you with a login screen.

Getting the necessary Debian Packages

now at first we need the mysql server:

apt-get install mysql-server

now set the mysql root user password

mysqladmin -u root password yourpasswordhere

at next step we need to add 2 more sources to our sources.list

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ testing main 
deb-src http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ testing main

now we can get the rest of the needed package to build myth via:

apt-get update
apt-get build-dep mythtv

-

Getting MythTV

Now you can get mythtv sources, but unless you have a really good reason to use the latest version from sid maybe you should just:

apt-get install mythtv

and if you want extras you can search for them with apt-cache search mythtv

If you really insist building yourself:

add your user to the staff group so you get write permission to usr/local now after logging in as a user (DON'T USE ROOT) do this:

svn co http://cvs.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv

This creates a folder called mythtv where the actual sources are in.

cd mythtv

and compile it with something like:

 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --arch=athlon-xp --enable-dvb --enable-dvb-eit
make
make install

The configure line above is only an example. In this example, the installation is configured to be under /usr/local. If you want to put it somewhere else, you can alter the --prefix argument. Run ./configure --help to see what options are available and necessary for you.

You will probably want to be root to run the "make install" part, though, because that target invokes ldconfig to set up shared library paths, and usually nobody but root can do this.

Starting MythTV

now you can setup mythbackend via mythtv-setup.