OneAndOneIs2

(Or, "Why I never install bleeding-edge software")

We tried to get MythTV installed this weekend.

I knew it would be tricky. That I accepted as a given. But we were using Gentoo, a distro I know well, and so I was at least moderately optimistic that we could handle it.

We got Gentoo installed OK, tho we had to use a stage3 (precompiled) install because stage 1 and 2 is no longer installed. There were a few hiccups caused by using an i386 tarball and then using i686 for portage, but a complete re-emerge of the system fixed it & effectively gave us an optimized, stage 1 install.

We've got MythTV installed, but have never actually seen it running, because config problems bit us. Two main ones: Getting lirc working so we could use the remote was the first. This seems to be down to either the kernel being too new, or the stable version being too old: We were going to try emerging the masked version & see if it was any better, but never got that far.

We tried to get xmltv working, so it could download TV listings. Numerous erros, and I checked the Gentoo forums: a known bug, marked as critical. No XMLTV any time soon. Not a fatal problem, as I understand that digital TV has listings that Myth can access.

And then, I tried to startx using the nvidia driver.

Silly me. I forgot that, being a proprietary driver, nvidia lagged behind the kernel. So it wouldn't work either. And the TV-Out cable will only work with the proprietary driver.

So, at best, we could setup MythTV without a remote control and without being able to plug it into a TV. That's about as useless as it gets, so I've called a halt for now. We'll try again when some of the problems have been fixed.