Introduction Environment Hardware - Selection - Installation Software - OS Installation - Networking - X-Windows - Audio - MythTV Frontend Links

MythTV Frontend By this point I'd got the OS up and running with networking, sound and graphics all working fine so now it was time to start getting MythTV itself up and running. Because I'm not using MythTV to actually record TV (I mainly want to be able to watch programmes recorded by my TiVo device), I didn't need to install the whole MythTV package. Instead I just installed the client MythTV Frontend software. First though, I needed to upgrade KDE. Upgrading KDE The first step was to update KDE to a later version. MythTV relies on the QT library that KDE uses and I found that the version installed with Debian by default was too old to work with MythTV. Upgrading to the 3.1.3 release of KDE is straight forward though. First I added the following line to the end of my /etc/apt/sources.list file: deb http://download.kde.org/stable/3.1.3/Debian stable main And then I did the following as the 'root' user: # apt-get update # apt-get upgrade Installing MythTV Frontend There are Debian packages for MythTV so installation is easy. As I didn't want this to be a backend MythTV system I just installed two of the Myth packages to get the bits that I needed. Firstly I added the following lines to the end of my /etc/apt/sources.list file: deb http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian woody lame deb http://cedar-solutions.com/ftp/debian stable main deb http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian woody mythtv Then, as 'root' I ran: # apt-get update Now I installed the MythTV database package which sets up the database that Myth uses. As one of the pre-requisites of this package it automatically installs mysql too. As 'root' I did the following: # apt-get install mythtv-database There are quite a few prompts for options during the installation of this package, most of them from the install of mysql. I selected the default options for all of them except when it asked me whether I wanted to have the mysql server start up on machine boot-up. The default was no, but I changed it to yes. I was also prompted to select a password for the root mysql user. I just left this blank as I think part of the mythtv installation may fail if this is not blank. I can always set the password to something sensible later. Next, I installed the MythTV frontend package by doing the following as the 'root' user: # apt-get install mythtv-frontend During the installation of that package I was prompted to indicated where the backend machine is located. I don't have a backend machine but I just let it keep the default setting of 'localhost'. Configuration The installation of the MythTV packages creates a user called 'mythtv'. The first thing I did was to set the password of that user by doing the following as the 'root' user: # passwd mythtv Now I logged out of KDE and then back in again but this time logging in as the new 'mythtv' user. Once logged in I launched the MythTV frontend from a command prompt: $ mythtv-frontend When the frontend starts you are presented with two icons, one for 'TV', the other for 'Settings'. I went into the 'Settings' menu and then used the 'General' settings wizzard to look at the default settings. The only thing that I changed was to allow a key (ESC) for exiting from MythTV. That way, when you go back to the main menu and hit ESC you are given the option to exit or shutdown the machine. I'm sure that there are lots of other configuration settings that I will need to make, but for now that is all that I did. Once I figure out what settings I need to make I will return and document them here.