Adventures with Ruby

As a fond user of mythtv, I recently decided to give a clean mythbuntu installation a try. Before I came to that, let me tell you what kind of problems I had after upgrading to gutsy gibbon. I have a server, playing webserver with postfix, courier and dspam, performing the noble task of webserver (as you can see), file server, but certainly not least of all: it is my mythtv master backend. Master being the only backend in this case. I have a sparkling Antec Fusion as a mythtv frontend. Having done a real skinny installation with feisty, I decided to upgrade to gutsy. Problems arose.

It started with my screensaver. It didn’t detect activity anymore from my remote or from playing videos. So I had to press a button or move my mouse every 10 minutes. Second, and I had that problem from the start: samba shares would not mount properly at boot time. I had no clue, neither did any log file. After a kernel upgrade to 2.6.22-14, I could not get my remote to work (Logitech Harmony 525, posing as a Hauppauge pvr350 remote, using a Philips USB infrared receiver; why shouldn’t it be complicated?).

I had it with all this mayhem. I would install a fresh MythBuntu 7.10. First time I downloaded it, there were some errors on the cd, but the second time, it worked. Installation was done in a wimp, no problems at all. Now for the configuring. It started with my favorite theme ‘MythCenter‘ all in Widescreen, the right resolution for my Samsung le32r82b. My guess is that it took those settings from my previous installation, or that they are somewhere in the ‘mythconverg’-database. It is such a mess, so any setting might or might not be in there. Of course I had to install updates, proprietary drivers and lots more, but this being Ubuntu, it all worked!

In the live cd version of the frontend it provided me with a nice interface for getting my videos from samba. I was pretty impressed how that was done, but once I installed it, I couldn’t find it anywhere. It looked for my videos in the same spot it once did, so I had to do the samba installation manually.

The remote wasn’t working anymore after installing it, which I found rather odd. There is definitely a big difference between the live cd and the installed version, which is a pity. It looks like the developers did a great job, but focussed on the first impressions, but the rest is a bit less. I managed to make my remote working by letting it emulate a Windows Media Center remote and setting that in the mythbuntu control center. By the way, speaking of first impressions, the official mythbuntu theme is quite nice.

I regret not having installed a backend with mythbuntu, but my backend is still working perfectly and it’s not worth it doing the installation of postfix etc all over again. If I had a backend to install, I certainly would use mythbuntu. I even believe it would be doable for a non-linux nerd, but you’d have to be a nerd nevertheless. I would mark it with a 8 out of 10. Excellent!