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!

Compiling and installing MythTV on a VIA EPIA 800 (586) system

I have four of these old 586-based 800Mhz EPIA boards lying around and I’ve been desperate to find a (funky) use for them. Eventually, I concluded that these would make great (if not super-powerful) media front-ends and, after a bit of R&D, I settled on MythTV as the app that was going to make this happen.

So I toyed around with MythTV on a faster test box and decided to install the excellent MythBuntu distro onto the EPIA and promptly got extremely confused. Whenever I started any of the Myth apps I was rewarded with… nothing! Starting the apps from the menus had zero effect so I started a shell and ran first the backend (mythbackend) and then the front end (mythfrontend) and got;

illegal instruction

Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought… A quick bit of Google and I’m sure I’ll get the answer! I got the answer, all right - the team behind MythTV stopped supporting the 586 a long time ago and this “Illegal Instruction” was telling the truth; MythTV was trying to run an instruction that my CPU did not have.

A quick (well, not that quick) shot at other distros including standard Ubuntu and MythDora showed that they were all using non-586 compatible builds.

Not to be outdone, and still desperate to find something to do with my EPIAs I decided to build my own 586-compatible version of MythTV on top of an existing MythBuntu system. I chose MythBuntu as the base because it already had all of the harnessing for a dedicated MythTV box – it was just missing code that would execute.

The following has all been tested on a MythBuntu 8.10 system which, unsurprisingly, is based on Ubuntu 8.10. It may work on other systems but you’re probably on your own there.

There are two routes you can follow to here;

1. Download the script that will do everything for you, from here
2. Run the commands one at a time

I’ve documented both approaches but the script is probably easier because;

• It captures the output from each command (which can be veeeeeeeeeeeery long) into separate log files so you don’t get the display cluttered up
• It checks that each command completes before moving on to the next
• It’s just easier!

Related posts;

	Installing from the script	Installing MythTV onto a 586, using a shell script
	What the script does	coming soon
	Installing by hand	coming soon

Please let me know how you get on.

MythTV and some very old EPIA 800's

A couple of years ago, I thought it would be a wizard idea to buy a bunch of Epia Mini-ITX boards, shoe-horn them into a single chassis, and then set each one to a specific task (file server, uPnP media server, mail server, apache server).
Needless to say, the project never really got off the ground and I'm now running all of these applications on an HP ML110, bought for £95, which is running VMWare Server 2.0 64bit.

So, now, I'm left with four Epia boards that I must be able to find a use for, right?

The plan is... use them as dumbish media front-ends. One in the study, one in the living room and one on the kitchen, all able to surf the web, play MP3s and the odd video. Playing BBC iPlayer and youTube would be a bonus.

Easy, huh? Just download one of the many Linux media front ends and off we go? Nope, because most of them seem to need a 686 level CPU and these old Epias are resolutely 586.
MythDora (based on RedHat) refused to boot, because we were missing some important instruction.
I managed to install MythBuntu, but trying to start the MythTv front-end fails with an "illegal instruction" message. Further investigation shows that the MythBuntu distrib (and most MythTv binaries) have been compiled to require a 686 level CPU.
Not to be beaten, I am now going through the relatively tortuous process of recompiling MythTv for a 586 class processor. I'll let you know how I get on ;-)

Update – now working! Details at Compiling and installing MythTV on a VIA EPIA 800 (586) system