As I mentioned the other day, I have set out to build a home theater PC that runs MythTV. I also wanted to keep with my “minimum” theme and do it with minimum effort. So, I downloaded KnoppMyth, only half-expecting to have things up and running in the 10 minutes or so that they managed to pull off in Systm Episode 2 - MythTV. As you can probably guess by the fact that I’m doing an entry on it, things did not go quite as planned…
I have the system built, and it fires up just fine (after discovering that I misread the motherboard header information and plugged the power switch in at the wrong spot). I set system the date and time to UTC and told the system to boot from CD. Everything is going well until I get to network detection. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, as I’ve disabled the onboard NIC and used a Linksys WiFi card from another system. So I thought I’d skip anything that required the network and do those items later.
And then I discover another problem. Even though everything else appeared to go well, both tuners display a snowy picture. This may be a result of choosing us-cable instead of us-cable-hrc or us-cable-irc, but I had not discovered how to check this yet. From what I gather, if you tune to channels 5 and 6 and they’re clear, then this setting is incorrect. But, as I said, I didn’t know this at the time and went searching the web for possible solutions. Many seemed to indicate that because of the internal RF splitter for the dual tuners, I may need an RF booster.
I immediately stopped where I was, and because I only had 10 minutes invested, did a quick install of Windows XP Home. I installed my WiFi drivers and the drivers for my dual-tuner card, and downloaded some free Windows PVR software. Both tuners display nice and clear, so I’m guessing newer IVTV drivers (the Linux drivers for the Hauppauge X50/500 tuners) might solve my problems. So, back to installing KnoppMyth I go, planning on using ndiswrapper to load my wifi drivers and download the ivtv drivers.
After a bit more searching, I discover that ndiswrapper is included in the latest KnoppMyth distribution. Except it doesn’t want to work right with my card for some reason, and I’m not sure why. I think it could be a version conflict between ndiswrapper and the Linux wireless tools that are included in KnoppMyth, but I’m not sure. Everything seems to load OK, but I cannot get the card to associate with any AP. It insists that it stay in adhock mode instead of managed mode, despite being told otherwise. So, download the ndiswrapper source to CD from another machine, and copy them to the KnoppMyth machine and try to compile, but receive an error about having the wrong version of gcc.
A little more searching the web, and I discover that some wifi cards might need switched to “mode any” and then back to “mode managed” before the setting will stick, so I decide to try to determine if my card is one of the ones that suffers this bug, and install Fedora Core 4 on the MythTV machine. I copy the ndiswrapper source from CD and compile, and load my WiFi drivers with complete success. So, since I have Fedora already installed, I try out the Fedora Myth(TV)ology Howto. But it breaks with the nVidia video drivers. Go figure.
So far, this has been much more than minimum effort. Since Fedora seemed to be going well until I had trouble with the nVidia drivers, I did a little more digging on the web and discovered MythDora. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I hope is solved the “minimum effort” problem. I’ll try it this evening and report back with my findings.
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