MythTV and Ubuntu 8.10

I have decided to start playing with MythTV. I have a Dell Inspiron 530 that I purchased a 750 GB SATA drive for so that I can use that HD when playing with MythTV.

My Configuration

2 GB RAM
NVIDIA 256 MB GeForce 8600 GT
Samsung 750G 7200RPM 32MB Cache SATA II
PLDS DVD+-RW HD-16A6S Dual Layer SATA DVD
Realtek ALC888 HD Audio
Dvico Dual Digital 4

NIC

The first problem I en-counted was the the computer did not operate on my network. For some reason even though the card was configured for DHCP it never was assigned an IP address. I found that if I rebooted my computer twice it seemed to permanently fix the problem. If it does not you can overcome this problem by.
Edit /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

For some reason my eth0 setting were not listed.

Video

When Ubuntu first loads I got a message about using a proprietary driver. I selected to active the latest version of the driver. When I used the standard video drivers I could not get the correct aspect ration and it seemed that the interlacing was not lined up correctly. After installing the NVIDIA drivers everything seemed to work well.

If you did not load the drivers when prompted you can do so here.
Close down all applications and go to another session F3 as an example.

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/177.82/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-177.82-pkg1.run
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-177.82-pkg1.run

NOTE: Look here for the latest driver.

DVB

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=616103

There were issues getting the Dvico Dual Digital 4 card working in Linux systems but Ubuntu 8.10 now has the drivers built in. We still need to download and install firmware though. The file required is xc3208-v27.fw which can be downloaded from here. NOTE: You will need an account on the Ubuntu Forums to download the file. I also copied the file to my WEB server here just so it was easy to access.

firmware

wget http://www.testforme.com/download/misc/xc3028-v27.fw.tar.bz2
tar jxvf xc3028-v27.fw.tar.bz2
sudo cp xc3028-v27.fw /lib/firmware/

firmware requirement

sudo -i 
apt-get update
apt-get install mercurial build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`
hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb
cd v4l-dvb
make
make install 

remote

dmesg | grep IR

You should see something like

input: IR-receiver inside an USB DVB receiver as /class/input/input6

or

input: IR-receiver inside an USB DVB receiver as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1e.0/0000:02:00.2/usb11/11-1/input/input6

Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/60-symlinks.rules
and add this line at the bottom

KERNEL=="event*",SYSFS{name}=="IR-receiver inside an USB DVB receiver",SYMLINK="input/irremote" 

reboot so /dev/input/irremote is made
after reboot in terminal type

sudo apt-get install lirc
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc

scroll down to linux input layer then select it on page 2 for IR transmitter select none on page 3 select /dev/input/irremote

Download lirc2.tar.bz2 from the Ubuntu forums or from here from my WEB site.

wget http://www.testforme.com/download/misc/lirc2.tar.bz2
tar xvjf lirc2.tar.bz2
cd lircx
cp -R lirc /etc
mv /etc/lirc/lircrc ~/.mythtv
ln -s ~/.mythtv/lircrc ~/.lircrc
sudo ln -s ~/.mythtv/lircrc /etc
sudo ln -s ~/.mythtv/lircrc /etc/lirc

now restart lircd

sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart 

To test

irw 

Installing MythTV

sudo apt-get install mythtv

Configuring MythTV

mythtv-setup