Sunday, November 01, 2009

Mythbuntu and diskless frontend Machines

I have now configured diskless booting over the network for my Myth system.

It was remarkably easy as well. Used this link, and it worked straight away using my Toshiba A5 laptop as a testbed, in about 1 hour. Really really impressed.

Only gotcha is that the diskless options do not appear in the Mythbuntu Control Centre on versions 9.10. Spent a while trying to identify the source of that issue, before finding on the mythbuntu foums that it is a known issue at the minte.

The frontend machine in one of the bedrooms is a Athlon XP 2000 with an Nvidia Geforce 4300MX hooked up via Svideo, so the graphical display did not show on first boot.

No problem, login to a console as the normal user and execute the following command sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-96

Once installed edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (or copy one across if there isn't one) and change the driver to nvidia if it isn't already.

Reboot, and you should have a graphical front end.

Only problem now for me on a Sunday evening, is that I no longer have a wired mouse in the house to configure Mythbuntu Control Centre!

Rebuild of Myth using Mythbuntu

When Myth 0.22 was released, the temptation to upgrade was too strong to resist.

Only issue was that I was running Knoppmyth R5.5, which would need a stack of updates before I could build Myth, or upgrade to R6.

I've been running Knoppmyth for several years, and know it fairly well, and have lots of tweaked config files etc for it.

Decided to go with the upgrade, and installed all the updates, including the current nvidia binary driver. Apart from a few problems with the database encoding, the upgrade seemed to go OK, but shortly afterwards the box started crashing, and became really, really unstable.

As knoppmyth R6 is built on a different distro to R5 (arch linux vs debian) most of the commands etc are completely different.

With this in mind I decided to change over to Mythbuntu, the reasons for this are:

OS upgrade using Knoppmyth needs the OS partitioning flattening anyway, so there is no loss there.

Mythbuntu 9.10 has Mythtv 0.22 as native, unlike knoppmyth R6 which only has 0.21fixes

Mythbuntu has a build optimised for the AMD64 architecture, again unlike KM.

Basic build procedure was.

1. Run Knoppmyth's backup routine, which backs up /etc /home and the database.

2. Install Mythbuntu on the OS partition, being extra careful not to format the data partitions

3. Run the basic bare config needed to get Mythbuntu running.

4. Edit /etc/fstab with the commands to boot the data partions. Either mount the partitions manually or reboot.

5. Ensuring that the mythbackend is stopped, restore the backed up Myth database.

6. Copy the .mythtv folder from the backed up /home/mythtv directory. This contains the LIRCRC config file, and the xmltv config files for mythfilldatabase

7. Fire up the Mythbuntu Control Centre, and configure the system.

8. Reboot, and test and the box is back.

I haven't yet reinstalled Slimserver, or torrentflux on the server, and although torrentflux is on the cards, I probbably won't bother with Slimserver, as I do not have any squeezeboxes, and don't stream from the server any more.