Installing MythTV onto a 586, using a shell script

For background, see Compiling and installing MythTV on a VIA EPIA 800 (586) system

First, the basics. You need to install MythBuntu 8.10 onto your system first. The reason I stipulate this is that MythBuntu already has all the pre-requisite scaffolding and configuration to get MythTV up and running – we are just going to update the applications to be 586-friendly.

You can probably take the manual instructions (see separate post) and get MythTV compiled on anotehr distro but that will take a little experimentation.

So; you’ve got MythBuntu up and running. Now download the script from here, and make it runnable by typing;

  chmod 700 ./BuildMyth586.sh

Then execute the script by either;

  ./BuildMyth586.sh

or

  sudo ./BuildMyth586.sh

the latter may be the best bet as a number of tasks require to be run as root (make install for example), plus the entire process takes several hours on an 800Mhz CPU. Running the whole script via sudo means you only need to enter your password at the start.

You will see the following prompt;

This script will download, compile and install MythTV onto a MythBuntu system. It has been checked on ^Ubuntu 8.10 but *may* work on other releases Please ensure that you have backed up your system before progressing. You may be prompted for your password every so often. This is passed to 'sudo' to perform operations requiring root access.

Press Return to continue  and, all being well, you should see a succession of messages scrolling up the screen, similar to the following;

Getting Subversion (http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-21-fixes/) Getting Build Essentials (g++ build-essential linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic) Getting Myth Build Dependencies (libfreetype6 libqt3-mt-mysql libmp3lame0 libmp3lame-dev libXxf86vm-dev libxv-dev libfreetype6-dev qt3-dev-tools) Getting Myth Plugins Build Dependencies (libmad0-dev libvorbis-dev libflac-dev libcdaudio-dev libcdparanoia0-dev libtag1-dev libtiff4-dev libexif-dev kdelibs4-dev) Building Myth - this could take a loooong time...

If anything goes wrong you will see a message similar to this;

Getting Subversion (http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-21-fixes/) Failed: Check /home/scott/MythBuild/_logsvn.out scott@mythtv1:~$

Check the file that is mentioned (MythBuild/_logsvn.out in this example) for help in diagnosing the problem.

Eventually(!) the script should complete and you will see the following;

Complete - all looks good! To start the back end, run /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start To run the front end, go to the Applications / Multimedia menu Remember to be careful when updating applications - if you update the MythTV applications this will probably restore the versions that do not work on a 586. If you do this, then either rerun this script or run make install from the following folders     /home/scott/MythBuild/release-0-21-fixes/mythtv     /home/scott/MythBuild/release-0-21-fixes/mythplugins For information on running MythTV refer to the documentation at www.mythtv.org or www.mythbuntu.org scott@mythtv1:~$

If you intend this machine to be a backed, then start the backend services as detailed. Then you can run the frontend by going to the Applications / Multimedia menu.

I’m not going to go into any detail on configuring and using MythTV – the official sites do a much better job than I ever could.

Enjoy!