[myth-ie] ditching Mythbuntu, trying MythDora 4

[Brendan Kehoe]

Justin Mason wrote:
> Brendan, have you considered forgetting about RAID entirely and just doing
> a nightly "dd" from one drive to the other, as a low-tecckup
> mechanism? ;)
>   

I thought about it, but decided to hold myself to the original
idea...after waiting > 3 years to do anything at all, I wanted to stick
to the requirements I'd come up with.  I'd seen RAID1 work well for
things like a file-sharing server at my son's school, and figured with
all this effort (including the friend getting the disks from Fry's when
he was in San Jose California last year) I'd feel like I was copping out.

Granted, I was incredibly close to saying feckit and just using a single
500GB disk the other day, before I decided to try Mythbuntu.  And had I
gone that route it'd be up and running now.  S'ok.

We were out West staying with friends and deliberately didn't check our
mail or do anything remotely technical beyond watching films.  I'm
supposed to be working on Wednesday and Thursday, but will probably do
the next step on the Mythdora.  The 1360x768 (?) looks awesome and crisp
via the 15-pin VGA cable on our Samsung flat tv's PC input choice.  I'm
going to see what video play is like with the nVidia card we've
got...but I still think 720x576 via the PVR350 will prove better because
of the decoding on the board, even tho it may not look quite so fancy
via the regular RCA video cable.  But maybe I'll be wrong and I don't
have to potentially kill myself trying ivtv under Mythdora?  Tho for all
I know it may work perfectly fine, in contrast to the trouble getting
Mythdora to behave well.

I'm also beginning to wonder if I shouldn't cling so hard to the
PVR350.  The friend we visited has an EyeTV hooked up to his Mac Mini. 
It made me realize I should look at what might have come out since the
PVR350 in the form of a PCI card which might be somehow easier to get
going.  I was quite surprised to find it such a pain with Mythbuntu 7.10
after it working great for so long (Fedora Core 3 + ATRPMS).

B

>> On 15 Mar 2008, at 21:57, Brendan Kehoe wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> After happening upon the blog at
>>>
>>> http://www.ninjax.net/blog/?p=11
>>>
>>> I'm going to give MythDora a try, in hope it'll result in something a
>>> bit more happy than what I've experienced with Mythbuntu 7.10.  My
>>> motivation is in part driven by the comments at
>>>
>>>   http://www.ubuntu-forums.net/showthread.php?t=615070&page=2
>>>
>>>   ...
>>>   When gutsy was released, no one had yet tested the pvr 350 output.
>>>   There are two issues that were then discovered. The first is that
>>>   you need to install the xorg driver. That package is available on
>>>   the ppa. The next issues is that the pvr 350 api changed within
>>>   mythtv. You need to install the package on gutsy proposed to get
>>>   around this issue. Eventually this package will be copied over to
>>>   gutsy updates. If you are not getting it to work after using the
>>>   package on gutsy proposed, and installing the x driver from the ppa,
>>>   then you are configuring it incorrectly.
>>>
>>> I've killed myself making sure I've configured the living crap out of
>>> it, so I think there's actually a problem between the ivtv driver and
>>> the Xorg version using it.
>>>
>>> The MythDora installer recognized and used correctly the three RAID
>>> arrays (/, swap, and /video) I created before, so that certainly bodes
>>> well.  And it took very little time to get it to the point where it's
>>> now happily formatting those three array filesystems and going ahead
>>> with the install.  It'll be a little tedious popping in the second CD,
>>> but that will still be faster than the bucketload of downloads  
>>> Mythbuntu
>>> needed.
>>>
>>> I've got it going now and will probably collapse soon and finish
>>> tomorrow sometime, depending on whether my 6 year-old is able to play
>>> with his friends on the road or not.  :-)
>>>
>>> I was this  -> . <-   close to popping out the new disks and  
>>> sticking in
>>> the old one in a gesture of Fuck It All.  But then I realized I'd just
>>> have to go through all my preparation efforts (dumping the mysql
>>> database contents, syncing up various files, etc).  And my wife's  
>>> making
>>> a big deal of how we're forced to be Common(tm) and actually flip  
>>> around
>>> to find something to watch.  hehehe.
>>>
>>> Our youngest was awake at 3am last night and he and I came down for  
>>> the
>>> first time to watch TV that wasn't already recorded and waiting for  
>>> us.
>>> He went to bed at 4am after watching Star Trek: The Next Generation  
>>> and
>>> some BBC News 24 crap.  New experiences. :-)
>>>
>>> B
>>>