WholeHome

As you know, I’m working on a “Build your own DVR” eBook, (www.bocsco.com/dvr) – and I’ve had multiple requests to include MythTV in the discussion. I think it is a bunch of guys who want to be able to say they have a Linux box at home like a friend of mine from my boxing class. So I decided to dive in and put a simple system together for him. I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve not been a big Linux dweeb although I have strong roots in Sun based Unix systems from my days at Texas Instruments. Similar commands, an online support system, and an excellent find of Knoppmyth (a nice combo debian linux distribution with myth-tv) gave me legs.

It really is a beautiful thing in that low memory(512MB), a video card with a hardware encoder, and a really crappy old PC Pentium III 2 (ish) GHz is plenty to get started. Download the free iso from HERE, sign up for schedules direct EPG HERE, burn the iso to a CD and boot from it. Be sure to have your computer all set up before you do – all the memory in you will be adding, the video card and TV tuner card, and any peripherals plugged in. Pretty much, you type knoppmyth at the prompt and the system installs linux and mythtv. There are a few setup options but this video covers most of the basics.

A few suggestions :

• Do not stray from the recommended hardware unless you are ready to dive into linux setup files and know how to run vi. (Don’t know what vi means? – reread this bullet). In fact, I highly recommend using the Hauppauge 350 card as setup becomes automatic
• Get a big hard drive – it will keep you from having to mount new drives and set up remote sharing
• Read the Linux Basics howto on the knoppmyth wiki site – a great primer for getting you around in the command prompt enviornment
• Write down the basic hidden commands – from the GUI, Alt-S reruns setup, Ctrl-Alt-1 gets you a new Xwindow to perform linux commands, ctrl-alt-7 gets you back to the gui.

Me, I had a defective Hauppauge 350 card and spent 3 hours trying to figure out why it was not even recognized by the system – ah, yes, the joys of defective hardware.

So – if youknow linux, this is a great option… If you don’t this will end up being a dead end of frustration for you.