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Thursday, January 15, 2009

Install mythtv on openSUSE 11.1

Last night I had one of those tinkering fits that occasionally over take me, and I updated my mythtv operating system to openSUSE 11.1. Since there aren't any really good instructions for this procedure (even the mythtv wiki is a bit stretched), I figured I'll post my instructions here.

My backend (and frontend) machine:
  • Pentium D 920
  • 1Gb Ram
  • Hauppauge PVR-350
  • 900 Gb hardware RAID 5 (4 x 300 Gb) with Areca ARC-1210 controller
  • Geforce 7300 GS
With the exception of the video, all the components in the machine here have good out of the box drivers.

Anyways, I chose the basic X11 installation from the DVD, since I wanted to avoid installing too much extraneous software.

The majority of the install is done from the command line so here goes (As best as I can remember):

zypper ar http://packman.unixheads.org/suse/11.1
zypper install mythtv-backend mythtv-doc myththemes mysql
rcmysql start && mysqladmin -u root password mysecretpassword

mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/packages/mythtv-doc/database/mc.sql

mysql -u root -p mythconverg
grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"%" identified by "mythtv";
flush privileges;
quit;


Then with a running X session run the setup program, and there is plenty of documentation available for this on the mythtv wiki

mythtv-setup


Next I created a user "myth", installed gdm, and configured the autologin, note that no password was set here for the user "myth"

useradd myth -m
zypper install gdm
sed s/DISPLAYMANAGER="xdm"/DISPLAYMANAGER="gdm" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager
sed s/DISPLAYMANAGER_AUTOLOGIN=""/DISPLAYMANAGER_AUTOLOGIN="myth" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager


Next I started yast and from the run level editor, I added both mythbackend and mysql to the start in run levels 3 and 5

Finally to get the frontend to display upon boot I edited the file /home/myth/.dmrc to read

[Desktop]
Session=mythTV


Restarted the machine to test all was well, and I was up and running.

Not bad, as far as time goes either. In total the installation took me about an hour and half.

-Ted

2 comments:

  1. Oh, one other question?

    If a system had an AMD BE2400 with 2GB RAM would you install the 32 or 64 bit version of OpenSuse 11.1?

    Thanks

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  2. Generally speaking you want to look at using gdm or kdm for the auto login features when going for a mythtv install.

    I have no idea whether or not XFCE has a login manager these days anyways.... hmm, certainly something to look up in due time

    Anywho, you will need to install one or the other of the standard login managers.

    As to your other question regarding the architecture thingy, I would personally go for 64bit on any machine that supports it. I have no empirical rational behind this but it really won't hurt.

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