Strav's blog

The Jetway MiniTop is a very small form factor mini computer.  At the price points I was able to get it, it was a great buy and makes for a very competent MythTV frontend.  The fan can get a little loud but other than that minor issue, it's a fantastic unit and relatively cheap.  

There are a few quirks with it.  The built in remote control does not seem to work with LIRC.  Some kind soul came up with a linux Generic HID Remote Driver that makes it work however.

[LINUX] Generic HID Remote Driver for XBMC (Drivers for XBMC on Linux and XBMC Live)

The HDMI Audio is a bit fussy as well.  In addition to the initial setup from the links below, for some reason, most of the time when the system restarts, I need to run the MythTV Audio Setup to get audio to work.

hdmi audio works only with aplay -D
ALSA DigitalOut
ALSA Dmix

Article explaining how to set up suspend/resume with remote for Mythbuntu frontend

http://www.pcmediacenter.com.au/forum/topic/39679-mythbuntu-frontend-build-xbmc-mythtv-suspendresume-with-remote/

Last weekend I finally decided to upgrade the MythTV backend from .20 to .21. In Ubuntu, this means also upgrading the OS in order to get access to the upgraded packages. I honestly expected this to be sort of a no-brainer which was much of the reasoning for going with Ubuntu in the first place. This system is fairly important so minimal downtime and NO data loss are both concerns so I started the process off by backing up the system (not something I normally do). That saved my a** in this case. The first issue was my own fault - coming from a Debian background, I updated the apt sources file to point to the 8.10 LTS repository and did an upgrade which blew up part way through upgrading libc6 and left the system in a state where I couldn't use apt or really much of anything else without segfaults. Restore from backup, research, and find out that Ubuntu does not support upgrading directly from 7.04 to 8.10. It needs to go 7.04->7.10->8.04->8.10 - OK. Unfortunately, it seems that the repositories from 7.10 and earlier have been dropped to make space for the new releases. Crap! So, I download the 7.10 alternate CD and try (4 times) to do upgrades from there to no avail. Finally a day and a half later and no closer to upgrading than when I started, I decide to do a 9.04 install from scratch and configure the system up from nothing. I had a basic MythTV backend system up and running in half a day with this approach. I'm going to detail out much of the process here for future reference.

Boot from livecd (I used knoppix 6.0 but any should do)
Manually partition drive
/boot 250M (be sure to make this bootable)
/swap 4G
/ 40G
/var/video remainder of drive
Reboot from KUbuntu cd and install OS
Remove the Network Manager - it prevented the IP Bonding from working properly
Set up network Bonding
Install all Myth packages
Import myth database from previous system
Copy video FS from previous system
Set up UDEV for the serial devices and network interfaces
Set up MythStatus
Copy over GRUB Screens and update menu.lst
Set up SAMBA (copy old samba config files)
Copy backup scripts
Copy files from
/pub
/home
/usr/local
/root
Copy crontabs
Configure Mythweb

in 2007 when I upgraded the myth backend server, I migrated the distribution from Debian to Kubuntu to be able to manage updates better. I didn't, however, migrate the frontend at the same time. This poses an issue as I don't want to have to deal with updating 2 different distributions in order to upgrade Myth versions. So I plan on migrating the frontend to Ubuntu which contains the same packages as Kubuntu but has a different default window manager. As part of this, I plan on changing the window manager from KDE which I currently run to Fluxbox since it is a much lighter window manager. Currently I'll outline what I think I need to do and update the post to accurately reflect the process so I can refer back to it in the future should I need to.

- Backup existing drive on minimyth
- Install basic Ubuntu OS
- Update fstab to include network shares
- Install and configure Fluxbox
- Install LIRC
- Install VNC
- Determine how to automatically start myth frontend
- Copy/Modify script to automatically restart myth frontend if necessary
- Determine if necessary to bring myth frontend to front and how to do so if it is
- Install backup script and cron job

Along the way, I found a new distribution called Mythbuntu. This is a unbuntu distro specifically designed to run Myth. Since this is exactly what I'm looking for, I'm in process of giving it a go. Installation was quite easy and basic configuration has gone well. Here's specific notes about what I'm doing.

To Do:
- Test sound
- OPTIONAL: need to find out how to raise window (mythfrontend)
- Tweak xorg settings for best performance
- See what can be done about the video distortion along the left edge of the screen during tv playback
Done:
- Old OS backed up
- Mythbuntu installed
- fstab updated to include network shares
- Installed LIRC - Note to self: make sure the IR header connecter is actually connected - DOH!. Also, MythTV expects the lircrc file to be in /home/user/.mythtv/lircrc. I put this file in the home directory and link it
- VNC installed as a base option
- mythfrontend starts automatically
- Turn off screen saver and dpms (power settings)
- configure to run as 'myth' user
- resolved hang on shutdown with the following 2 commands:

• ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc0.d/K15umountnfs.sh
• ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc6.d/K15umountnfs.sh

- Install backup script and cron job

http://dvbn.happysat.org/viewforum.php?f=17