- 03
- Apr
MythTV overhaul: The Switch from Fedora to Ubuntu
Part 1:
- Background:
- My current environment is this:
- MythTV .20 (no patches) installed on Fedora Core 4.
- 1 WinTV Go tuner card (analog NTSC bttv software encoding)
- 1 WinPVR 150 tuner card (analog NTSC ivtv hardware encoding - mpeg2)
- 1 Air2PC tuner card (digital ATSC ?? maybe QAM updatable) - not setup
- ATI Radeon 9200 w/ S-video out
- 160 GB HD w/ Fedora Core 4 on it. Using LVM for the entire drive.
- So I started on this little adventure switching from Fedora Core 4 to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) for a few reasons:
- I’ve never liked Red Hat’s package management system
- I wanted to use Ubuntu originally when I first setup MythTV, but there was very poor support for MythTV on Ubuntu back in 2005.
- In my opinion, apt-get on debian based systems is far more stable and usable than yum on Fedora. I’ve ran into several problems with yum, and very few issues while using apt-get on Ubuntu.
- They dropped support for the yum repositories for Fedora Core 4. Yeah, I understand that they can’t maintain it forever, but upgrading to Fedora Core 6 from 4 is just as scary if not moreso than switching to Ubuntu. So I might as well just go with what I wanted in the first place.
My adventure begins after the break….
- Day 1:
I have an extra 80 GB drive, which I am going to use for the Ubuntu side of the environment. It’s good that I have an extra drive, so that I can work on the Ubuntu environment for awhile, and then just go back to the working Fedora environment (since this is probably going to take awhile to get Ubuntu up and working properly).
I attached a real monitor to the machine after previous tests with the Ubuntu disc proved that it would not display through s-video properly (I didn’t expect it to)
I put the drive in and had it had trouble recognizing it, even in the BIOS. I checked the jumper settings and it was using ‘cable select’, which should’ve been fine. After playing with it a bit and having no luck, I just switched the jumper to ‘master’. That worked fine. No idea why it didn’t like cable select.
I’m using the Ubuntu Alternate 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) disc. This disk’s installer options are a little confusing. It gives you 3 options: Install desktop, install a server, install in text mode’. I had no idea what the different options would do, so I ended up picking ‘install in text mode’.
Went through the install no problem. And started setting some stuff up. I got the s-video stuff working (although it doesn’t work for booting up Ubuntu and shutting down - no idea why). I got Kubuntu installed (I prefer KDE for use with Myth - well I prefer KDE in general over Gnome). After the install of Kubuntu, it wanted me to reboot. Ok. This time, I decided to check out my grub boot menu to make sure I could boot back up into Fedora. Ack. Nope.
So now, instead of setting up Ubuntu more, I need to work on grub to get it to boot Fedora. I’ve done some work with grub in the past (I’m more familiar with LILO), but I had forgotten most of that by now. So I use google and other sources to figure out how this is supposed to look. After more than an hour, I finally figured out how to do it.
Blam. Fedora is back up and running. And now I can boot smoothly into Ubuntu or Fedora. My wife is happy we can watch TV again.
More Ubuntu work to come…