My little MythTV project with FC4: Part 1
An admission, although trying once before to get the famed MythTV working (using Knoppmyth) I’ve been wanting to try it again ever since. Coupled with my new house being finished in around 3 months time with data points where most of the TV points are as well, and in the corner of the garage for my little home server I’m planning, I’ve been eyeing off the ability to split MythTV into backend and frontend, and looking at streaming plugins that will allow things to be streamed to other points in the house.
So over the next few days, or weeks, my little MythTV project will be tackling the Linux world.
Day 1: Red Hat
As I’ve said previously I’ve tried Knoppmyth before and it just didn’t work for me. Why, well I’m not quite sure (its instance that it swipes your hard disk probably has something to do with it, I want a bootloader so I can keep my WinXP setup), so I’m going the slightly harder route in hope that it will lead to MythTV nirvana.
Now, I’ve got to add that accept for playing around a bit with Linux distro’s, I’m not a Linux expert. Command line to me equals about 1985-1995, sure 10 years of CPC, Basic and then DOS, but it was a long time ago. But being stupidly brave as I am, I’m going to revist the command prompt again for this series of posts because quite simply, if your going to use MythTV your going to need to know how to use it.
The distro for this project: Fedora Core 4. Why? well its got a fairly good reputation, there is lots of info and support out there for it, there is an excellent site about Fedora and MythTV here, and, well, it was quicker to buy a copy of one of this months computer magazines that had Fedora Core 4 on it, then it is to download it 
But before we move on I’m presuming if your following this you’ve got FC4 on CD or DVD and ready to go.
Step One: insert CD 1 into computer, reboot and let it load (make sure that the BIOS is set to boot from CD before HD)
The initial part of the setup is easy, language, keyboard etc. Then we get to the partitions. (if your not up on what a partition is, read the Wikipedia entry here). Now, my experience with partitions and Linux goes back a few years with Red Hat to version 7 I think it was, and that was pretty simple: you specify you want to use an amount of free space to create a partition. I’d done the same thing with Mandrake (now Mandriva) early in 2004 as well. FC4, well its a problem, because unlike Mandrake/ Mandriva if you’ve got Windows installed on a particular machine it doesn’t want to play, because there is no ability for you to resize your Windows partition to then allow FC4 partitions to be created. Naturally I thought, ok then…I’ll find a program to do this. So I quit the install and go back into Windows, and look for some software to do this. Plenty of software available, but you’ve got to pay for it, and generally speaking I’m adverse to paying for something I’m probably going to use once, or at most a handful of times. To make things worse, you can download trials of such software, but you only then find out once its installed (presuming you don’t read the fine print first elsewhere) that it wont actually do the job unless you pay for it. Basically, a trial for a program like Partition Magic is to allow you to know what it looks like, but is basically a useless piece of rubbish. So, some 30 minutes of coming to this conclusion later, after searching far and wide for some free partioning software it hits me: I’ve done this in Mandrake before!
So off I went. I booted up my 18 month old copy of Mandrake and what do you know: I can resize the Windows partition and setup Linux partitions no problems what so ever. So I do this, then exit out.
Back to FC4: partitions resized I’m now able to tell it to delete existing Linux partitions and install FC4. The install takes about 30 minuts and uses two CDs. But wait, theres more, because you then get the bootloader options. I click that I want the bootloader, and yes, I want the option of booting either Windows or FC4, with Windows the default. Done, so I’d though, and I’d actually get FC4 up and running so I can then start working through installing MythTV. I reboot, and the box goes straight to Windows, no menu. I read instructions about Linux rescue options, so I reboot with FC4 CD 1 in the drive, use the command prompt to go to the rescue options, and then all I get is another command prompt. No way at all I could find to then boot FC4, which by this time I’m hopping if I can get it up I might be able to tweak the bootloader. Nearly 3 hours gone, and still nothing. The best advice I could find online: basically I’d installed the bootloader in the wrong place (I’ve got 2 Hard Drives) and that I’m best off to reinstall FC4 again. The thing I don’t get is that when I was running Mandrake previously for some time on dual-boot with 2 Hard Drives, I never had this problem, because it knew exactly where to install the boot loader. But FC4? User friendliness is definitely not something they’ve given a lot of thought to.
so thats the end of Part 1. In part 2 I should (touch wood) be posting to PVRSpot from within FC4 after I find the time in the next few days to do it all again. I know some people are going to tell me I should be using Mandriva, Gentoo or similar (even Knoppmyth), but again I’m using FC4 mainly for the drivers and support side. More soon!