Warning! This is a publish of a draft post I found from September 2014 (11 years ago!).. its waaay out of date, but I’ve lately been contemplating trying to get Mythbackend up and running, so tidied it up and will hit publish. If I can’t publish it in the past, it’ll show up in 2026..

Okay, I’m admitting defeat.

I just spent way too much of the last 24 hours locked in mortal combat with Centos 7, various repo’s, and combinations of Gnome3, Mate, and XFCE, but frankly, its just not a happy combo yet.  Not a huge surprise, as Centos is still newly released and not all the enterprise linux repo’s have built packages for el7 yet.

Instead, I’m going to do something I don’t like doing.  I’m going to run my mythtv box with Fedora.  Why don’t I like doing that?  I like the long-term support of RHEL variants like Centos.  Our current mythtv incarnation has been running Scientific Linux 6 pretty much since the month EL6 was released – I went with SL6 because Centos were tardy with Centos 6, and it wasn’t out when I built the box.

So I’m going to take the opportunity to document the Fedora 20 setup commands for mythtv, as they should be very similar to the ones for Centos 7 once its matured a bit.

Hardware

Firstly, a bit about my new myth box’s hardware.  It runs:

• i3-3220  (Ivy Bridge),
• Asus P8H77-M LE motherboard,
• 4GB DDR3,
• 60G A-data SSD,
• 2TB Samsung drive,
• Blu-ray drive,
• Nvidia GT430 fanless graphics card

Setting up Fedora 20

I grabbed the Fedora Mate/Compiz spin and installed from a usb stick running the live image. First thing after install, enable connecting to it.

systemctl start sshd.service
systemctl enable sshd.service

And then lets update it – can’t believe these plugins aren’t default behaviour!

yum install yum-plugin-fastestmirror yum-plugin-priorities
yum update -y

vi /etc/selinux/config
reboot

yum install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-20.noarch.rpm
 yum install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-20.noarch.rpm
 yum install http://dl.atrpms.net/all/atrpms-repo-20-7.fc20.x86_64.rpm

This is where it gets a bit tricky.. rpmfusion and atrpms don’t always keep pace with each other.. so we need to make sure one doesn’t kill software installed from another when updates happen.

$ ls /etc/yum.repos.d/

atrpms-bleeding.repo  fedora-updates-testing.repo          rpmfusion-nonfree-rawhide.repo

atrpms.repo           rpmfusion-free-rawhide.repo          rpmfusion-nonfree.repo

atrpms-testing.repo   rpmfusion-free.repo                  rpmfusion-nonfree-updates.repo

fedora.repo           rpmfusion-free-updates.repo          rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing.repo

fedora-updates.repo   rpmfusion-free-updates-testing.repo

Notes are sketchy here as I wrote this a while ago and just came across a draft, but as I’m thinking of trying mythtv again (most likely mythbackend only – using something else as frontend). Here’s where I landed:

priorites:  fedora: 10  atrpms: 50 rpmfusion: 30 scrpms: 20


yum install yum-plugin-kmdl

Next up..

Nvidia drivers for the GT430

yum install http://scrpms.net/pub/RPMS/f20/x86_64/scrpms-repo-20-7.fc20.x86_64.rpm 
set priority=20
yum install nvidia-graphics340.32
vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
blacklist nouveau

And because, like a zombie, you just have to make sure..

vi /etc/default/grub
selinux=0 nouveau.modeset=0 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau  (after  "rhgb quiet")
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
dracut -f -v

And then lets sort out the window manager to auto-login so kids don’t have to deal with lack of TV if there’s a power outage and the box stops booting.

vi /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
autologin-user=mythtv

LIRC time!

THen its time to sort out the IR receiver and remote..

yum install lirc lirc-remotes lirc-doc

And make it persistent

systemctl enable lircd.service
 systemctl start lircd.service
 yum install lirc-disable-kernel-rc

And finally.. we’re on to the actual goal!

Installing Mythtv.. from scratch!

Been a while since I did this.. like a really long while. THe post I made in 2013 was a continuation of a myth database install I did in possibly um.. 2006?

 systemctl start mariadb.service
 systemctl enable mariadb.service
 mysql_secure_installation
 mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/mythtv-docs/database/mc.sql

And then login to the database.. and enable the usage

/usr/bin/mysql -u root -p mythconverg
GRANT ALL ON mythconverg.* TO mythtv@"%" identified by  "mythtv";
flush prvilieges

Almost there.. this is where I can’t recall the detail, because this was, like I said, a draft page for my own note taking. I’m only bothering because I might want this info again, and finding a draft unpublished page of mine is not gonna hit my radar!

mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -u root -p mysql

vi /etc/my.cnf

key_buffer = 16M
table_cache = 128
sort_buffer_size = 2M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 8M
query_cache_size = 16M

And finally.. we’re at the part where we find out if the hardware works, and if mythtv will actually pick up EPG and all the rest of that stuff 🙂

mythtv-setup

 Boom!

 Last thing – there was this awesome old perl script which compiled a bunch of scrapers for varous Free-To-Air TV guides to fetch more than the usual amount of EPG. Last I tried, it was having issues with some sources, but just in case I find it useful, here’s the script:

wget 'http://www.whuffy.com/shepherd/shepherd'

Hooroo!