The Things I Find

I gave up on LinuxMCE. Seriously, I’ve tried the old Ubuntu 6.10 install (and had it fail to download packages), I’ve tried installing it from source (it tries to change directory to one that doesn’t exist), and I’ve tried the V1.1 Beta2 version (again, it fails downloading packages). Each time was on a fresh OS install, which doubles your installation time, and it doesn’t fully support my 64 bit processor. Enough, already.

So I tried building a straight Ubuntu 7.04 build using Garry Parker’s superb MythTV Ubuntu Installation Guide… and it worked. I had a couple of minor glitches - mostly trying to set up the Xbox MythTV front-end - but apart from that it was easy. Call it two hours work, but with much of that waiting for things to install, rather than actively working. I took a couple of notes on the issues I had to fix:

• I had to bind MySQL to the actual IP address of the machine, rather than the loopback address (127.0.0.1); otherwise I couldn’t contact it over the network. This is easily done in the mythtv-setup program, under “General”.
• I had to bind Samba to the NIC, rather than to all network interfaces, otherwise I got all these weird “Can’t contact domain controller” errors when mapping drives. Network traces indicated that my XP box and the MythTV box were talking SMB, but not to the point of sending directory listings etc. Look for the line “interfaces = ” in /etc/samba/smb.conf and change it to “interfaces = eth0“. Also, the default Windows workgroup is “workgroup”, but the Samba one is different. You might want to change it; it’ll save you a mouse click when you’re surfing through “Network Neighbourhood”.
• The Xbox frontend wouldn’t connect to the MySQL instance on the MythTV. This is due to the MythTV 0.20 MySQL install using a newer password hashing system than the XBox front-end. Using the instructions found here I rehashed the password and it connected OK. Grab the MythTV MySQL user’s password (it’s in “/var/www/mythweb/.htaccess“), then run MySQL as root (”sudo mysql“), then type:
UPDATE mysql.user
SET password=OLD_PASSWORD('Your MythTV User Password‘)
WHERE user=’mythtv’;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

The Xbox MythTV frontend still seems a little flaky to me, but it’ll do.

On a related note, that Ubuntu install has sounded the death knell for my Fedora desktop. Sudo installed and configured by default, the fact that I can point apt-get it at my ISP’s mirror and get patches at 1.5 megabytes per second that don’t count against my monthly download allowance (yes, I know that’s possible in Fedora, but I’m damned if I can get it to work), the way applications that are missing components will automatically download them, VMWare Server, Firefox 2 by default… All it needs is a prompt in “GEdit” to sudo itself if you try to save a file that you don’t have permission to write to, and it’d be perfect.