Coming Full Circle

Around a week ago, I made a blog entry about the difficulties I encountered during my workstation’s upgrade from FC4 to FC5. With that bitter memory still fresh in my mind, I had expected to spend this entire weekend on my MythTV box’s upgrade. To my great surprise, the process went very smoothly, and took no more than 6 hours. In fact, I even saw HUGE NFS performance improvements because of FC5.

Since the famous Fedora Mythology is currently not actively maintained, I’m going to post some tricks I took to setup my FC5 MythTV box here. I will caveat it by saying that I am not posting compete instructions, but rather notes that I think would be useful for someone going through this process.

1. Always partition your disks such that your kernel could be swapped in and out. For example, my mythTV box currently has the following partitions:
• /boot (ext3) on /dev/hda1
• / (ext3) on /dev/hda2
• /home (reiserfs) on /dev/hda3
• /videos (jfs) on /dev/hdb1 (recordings for mythTV)
2. Since Fedora is terrible at actual upgrades, I highly recommend doing a full blown install on your / partition even if you are “upgrading”. If your disks are setup like mine above, you would only have to backup your mysql database (mysqldump) and your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. All the other settings in /home/ would be recovered when you remount /home.
3. When you are finished installing from the CDs, run this script (atrpms.sh) so that you can add atrpms to your yum respository. Do a yum -y update immediately following and install the modules and programs that you need. (In my case, they were NVIDIA, IVTV, LIRC and mythtv-suite). The instructions are exactly the same as Fedora Mythology’s instructions for FC4. I am going to post my xorg.conf here just for reference.
4. Interestingly, FC5 MythTV now considers PVR-350′s Tuner0 as Tuner1. In order to avoid headaches later on (like off by one channel syndrome), it is worth the effort now to delete all the current information in mythtvsetup, and re-enter them.
5. I spent a long while with modprobe.conf and was still unable to get lirc to successfully load on startup. What I ended up doing was putting the following two lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.local and it seems to work fine.
• /sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c
• /sbin/service lircd start
6. Spend some time reading about Fedora’s implementation of udev. I saw quite a few people having trouble with lirc because they don’t quite understand udev. If you don’t have a /dev/lirc0, that means your LIRC wasn’t initialized properly. If you do have a /dev/lirc0, but not a /dev/lirc, you cannot simply create a symlink in /dev. /dev is dynamically maintained. What you actually need to do is create /etc/udev/rules.d/lirc.rules and have the following two lines in the file:
• KERNEL=”lirc[0-9]*”, NAME=”lirc%n”
• KERNEL=”lirc0″, SYMLINK=”lirc
7. Fedora Mythology’s lircrc file for the PVR-350 remote is actually pretty messy. I’ve cleaned it up slightly and you could see mine here.
8. To avoid the mouse cursor showing up on screen when you are using MythVideo, you can install unclutter (i686 RPM here). Unclutter will remove the idle mouse cursor from the screen.
9. See Mauriat Miranda’s excellent guide here for information on setting up win32 codecs for linux (WMA files, etc).

Well, I hope the information above is useful to those of you upgrading your mythTV Fedora boxes. If you are still having issues, you can never go wrong asking for help on FedoraForum.org.