Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Building my own MythTV, day 2

The software install worked, technically speaking. Unfortunately the channel listings and program guide don't work. Hyams' instructions blithely assume the phpMyAdmin setup's new root password is the same pw used by everything in MySQL, and that just ain't so. The table mythconverg that the mythtv user creates is automatically assigned a random 8-letter alpha password, and changing it in the PHP config files merely results in errors (which is what happened the first night I tried installing MythTV). The password is correct, the permissions are somehow messed up.

For the hell of it I'm going forward and upgrading to 0.19. As the instructions point out, MythTV-0.19 is a manual compile (estimated at 15 minutes, but still going after 2 hours on the 450MHz PIII). Compiling the plugins took another hour.

The biggest pain in the ass so far has been getting the box to forget there's an older version of Myth on the system and to exclusively point to the new one. I'm giving up on being nice and trying to get Hyams' PATH script to point the system to the new binaries; instead, I'm renaming the old binaries in /usr/bin, then replacing them with symbolic links to the new ones.