Anyone installed MythTV lately?

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Sasquatch
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by Sasquatch »

I'm updating this thread mainly so that if anybody lands here via a search they won't find yet another internet thread that died without answering the original question.

After much assistance from the folks on the MythTV forum I managed to get things sorted out. Seems most of the problem was due to me not properly clearing out the 'configure' and 'make' files after an installation failed. I thought these were overwritten each time you ran './configure' or 'make' but they aren't. So when the installation failed the first time because I overlooked a missing dependency I should have run something like;

Code: Select all

git clean -xfd
to clear out the old files. I didn't. So every time I ran './configure' or 'make' after that the process was tainted with corrupt data.

And the one major hitch in the process is that the most current stable release of MythTV (0.28.0) requires Qt 5.2 or later but the most current version of Salix (14.2) comes with Qt 4.8.7. If you want to easily install MythTV you have to use an older release, I went with 0.27.5. If you want the newest release of MythTV you'll have to install a newer version of QT to make it work. I think technically you only need a need a newer version of qmake. But qmake isn't available on its own. If there's a way to get qmake other than installing Qt that might simplify the process. And it is possible you need more than just qmake.

Also, too new a version of Qt will cause problems. Right now, MythTV still relies on QtWebKit (or something similar). But the newest version of Qt (5.7) has QtWebEngine instead. The developer who helped me get sorted out says there is talk about backporting MythTV over to QtWebEngine. But it isn't likely to happen in the near future.

The only other issue I ran into with the installation is that Salix 14.2 seems to have changed the names of some of the mysql config files. This caused me some confusion because the documentation available for setting up mysql was pointing to different files. The change isn't major, from 'mysql' to mysqld', but I had to look into /etc/ when I kept getting errors telling me "no such file or directory" when I was trying to manipulate the necessary files. The portion of the MythTV documentation dealing with the database ran into trouble here. And even the Salix documentation on getting mysql running is now a bit out of date. I'm not absolutely certain that this isn't causing issues after the install. I don't know what autogenerated files within MythTV may be pointed at the wrong mysql files. I am still having issues connecting to the database. But I can't say whether that's because the filenames have changed or because I goofed something in the process.

So... the short answer to the question in the title of this thread is, "yes, somebody has installed MythTV lately", me. If you use Salix 14.2 and MythTV 0.27.5 you should have no major problems. The walk-through in the MythTV documentation works perfectly. But you will have to adjust the instructions for setting up the mysql database to account for the changes that have been made to some files. Maybe somebody who's skilled with mysql (or MariahDB in this case) can provide some insight as to how to update the MythTV database process.
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gapan
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by gapan »

We have qt 5.6 in the repositories. The package name is qt5. Did you try building with that? From what you write, it should work as it is older than 5.7 and newer than 5.2.
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Sasquatch
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by Sasquatch »

I had no idea that was there. It was already installed on my system according to Gslapt. I added the qt5 webkit package as well since I know that is one of the things that I had problems with previously. Thanks for the tip. I'll retry the latest release of MythTV and report my findings.
Sasquatch
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by Sasquatch »

Seems I should have upgraded to 14.2 before I did anything else. MythTV 0.28.0 seems to have installed just fine after upgrading and adding qt5 and qt5-webkit via Gslapt. At least, I got no error messages during the process. I have no tuner card or antenna so I can't test whether everything is tied together.
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mimosa
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by mimosa »

Excellent! Do you have any tips for anyone else who may wish to do the same, beyond starting from 14.2?
Sasquatch
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by Sasquatch »

mimosa wrote:Excellent! Do you have any tips for anyone else who may wish to do the same, beyond starting from 14.2?
1) Make sure all the dependencies are installed first. I overlooked one missing dependency and that started a cascade of failure.

2) After upgrading to 14.2 be sure to install "qt5" and "qt5-webkit". If you are already running 14.2 make sure these packages are installed.

3) It may be better to wait and install it after you have a tuner card plugged in. The Myth backend won't run without an incoming signal. So you can't really test the function of the install. You can move around the menus a bit, but that's it.

4) Familiarize yourself with mysql/mariahDB. Mysql needs to be running in the background for MythTV to work. The instructions for how to start mysql as a background process don't work under 14.2. I'm a bit lost at the moment because I don't know for sure that the database I created under 14.1 is still working properly under 14.2.

Salix 14.2 seems to come with all the dependencies for MythTV 0.28.0 except for Qt >5.2 and QtWebKit. Those are the only packages I've added since upgrading to 14.2 and MythTV installed with no problems. I can start the backend, run the setup GUI and open the main GUI. I'm going to try adding a video to the directory to see if I can get playback without a tuner card.
Sasquatch
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by Sasquatch »

Now that I'm reasonably satisfied that I can successfully install and configure MythTV in Salix the next project promises to be quite a challenge. I'm sure I'll be asking many questions once I get started.

The idea is that the HTPC is going to be a single-purpose box. There's no need for e-mail, word processing, or photo editing programs on an HTPC, right? I want it to boot directly into the MythTV frontend just like any other media device boots into its frontend. If I start with a Salix core install, how do I determine what dependencies I need to install just to get MythTV and its plug-ins and supporting software to run? Do I just check the dependency list of each program against what is installed and continue adding new layers of dependencies until everything works?
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mimosa
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by mimosa »

Core may not be the best place to start - unless space is limited, Full may be a better choice. For example, you probably want an X server. Presumably, you won't want to boot via GDM, but then, you wouldn't want to boot to a tty either.

Beyond that, you surely have quite an adventure ahead!
Sasquatch
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by Sasquatch »

I think it would be cleaner to start with core since it's always easier to figure out what to add than to figure out what you can remove. It might even be quicker since I believe there would be fewer programs/libraries to add to core than there would be to remove from full. But neither option is "simple".

There's a wiki entry on adding X to the core. It doesn't look that difficult. Famous last words :D
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mimosa
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Re: Anyone installed MythTV lately?

Post by mimosa »

The only reason to do it that way round is lack of space. Having stuff you don't need doesn't hurt in any other way, but not having it can (and probably will) cause an extra headache somewhere. The worry about "cruft" dates back to the age of 5GB hard disks. It's probably also true that on an unstable system, anything you have installed may behave unpredictably - but you are not running Ubuntu ;)
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