Friday, September 3, 2010

Mythtv revisited with Mythbuntu

image 4 years ago I built a HTPC using Fedora and the experience was miserable,  I had given up on a linux HTPC and moved to Windows and was relatively happy until my S.M.A.R.T. drive reported impending doom.  I had to save my data and rebuilt my server,  which made me want to revisit RAID 1 (mirroring) and Linux.  From my experience, linux was going to be an uphill battle so I picked a path of least resistance with Mythbuntu (http://www.mythbuntu.org/)  and I was very pleasantly surprised.  I have a 3ware raid controller which is very easily supported across all linux platforms (3ware 8006) with a ASUS M2N-E motherboard with a nvidia graphics card (Gigabyte 8400GS 512MB GV) .  I recommend a fanless graphics card. 

 

I installed Mythbuntu and my mce remote and everything worked like a charm out of the box, AMAZING!  I had to turn off the display blanking and uninstall the xscreensaver but that was relatively easy.  Just add the following lines to your xorg.conf

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "blank time" "0"
Option "standby time" "0"
Option "suspend time" "0"
Option "off time" "0"
EndSection

I also installed Miro, Subsonic, and qbittorrent.  Miro for mobile video streaming, Subsonic for mobile audio,  and qbittorrent for rss torrent downloads.

I dont use Mythtv instead I use boxee which I launch from mythtv via the following addition to the mythtv menu

/usr/share/mythtv/themes/defaultmenu/mainmenu.xml

After:
<mythmenu name="MAIN">

Put:

<button>
<type>MENU_BOXEE</type>
<text>Boxee</text>
<action>EXEC /opt/boxee/run-boxee-desktop</action>
</button>

On day two I am very pleased with the progress of Mythbuntu as Boxee box.

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