Those of you who were at the recent MythTV installfest beta know that I brought an experimental, low-end, system on which to attempt an install of MythTV.
The experimental system consisted of: Pentium III, 600 MHz 192 MB RAM 200 GB SATA drive PCI SATA controller Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card (bt878 chipset, no hardware MPEG) Intel 82810E on-board video 106 MB IDE drive CDRW drive MythTV was successfully installed to this machine, in roughly the same amount of time as was required to install other higher-end systems. Notes on the process follow. * Attempting to do a standard install of FC6 failed when anaconda suddenly and unexpectedly died. This was likely due to having insufficient memory. * Attempting a bare-bones "custom" install of FC6 failed when anaconda *hung*, attempting to install kernel-xen-something. Anaconda appeared to be running in an infinite loop, yet doing nothing useful. (No disk space was being allocated, memory usage was roughly steady, and CPU usage was at 100%.) This could have been memory-related (such as failure to check a malloc return value) or the result of something like poor dependency handling. * Had the bare-bones FC6 "custom" install worked, it would have taken about 1/3 the time of the standard install. This suggests that leaving things like KDE and GNOME out of a MythTV install could create a significant speed-up and dramatically decrease the amount of disk space required for the system. * The Ubuntu installer (the non-server version) booted into a live CD desktop environment which was slow, resource-hungry, and annoying. I didn't even try installing Ubuntu from that environment. * Installing Ubuntu Server 6.10 was successful, took less time than an install of FC6, and required answering fewer questions than the FC6 installer did. * The Ubuntu Server installer did not, however, successfully install a bootloader. I had to boot the install CD in rescue mode and install GRUB manually in order to make a self-booting system. As this is one place where distrinstallation commonly gets tripped-up, it is reasonable to assume that bootloader problems will be frequently encountered at InstallFests. * The Ubuntu Server installer did not install X, a window manager, firefox, mysql, or any MythTV packages. I had to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to add repositories and "apt-get install" these packages. * The "apt-get install xorg" did not auto-configure for the hardware present. While there's probably a single Debian "magic command" to do this, I didn't know it. So I just edited xorg.conf manually. I changed the video driver to i810, deleted some unnecessary cruft, and was able to just startx&. Running xvinfo showed that the xv infrastructure was working properly. * Installing and configuring MythTV and its database was almost exactly like what was done for all the other systems. From this, it appears evident that the greatest source of gotchas and glitches come from installing the underlying OS rather than from the MythTV suite itself. * When downloading channel information, Myth failed to populate the UI with the information. Ben had to hit the button, wait patiently until it BLINKED, and the channel data appeared. * The complete installation of Ubuntu+MythTV consumed 3.1 GB of disk space. This compares quite favorably to the space required by standard FC6 installations. * Neither the base OS or MythTV install had any problems identifying or configuring the WinTV PCI card. Even the onboard digital audio was correctly identified and its module was autoloaded. * The Intel 82810E video chipset also caused no problems with either install. * Installing to such a low-end system required a significant amount of Linux Ninja Magic. (More, in fact, than I had expected.) It was definitely beyond the ability of noobs, and would require either (1) that the person already have a strong familiarity with Linux or (2) hand-holding from someone with that kind of expertise. Even with my experience, having the resources which we had (cable hook-ups, Internet access, a choice of several distributions, customized instructions on the GNHLUG web site, people to ask questions of, etc.) made things go a lot faster than they would have on my own. So, how about usability? The box was able to tune stations and watch them. Initially, when starting to buffer video, the playback was choppy (half-second pauses every couple seconds). But playback became smooth after the appropriate pages settled down into virtual memory. Rewinding live TV worked, as did the on-screen menu and channel guide. I did not try watching while recording a show, as the box clearly didn't have enough CPU power to do that. Basically, it was a just barely usable MythTV box. Conclusions: MythTV can be installed to, and is usable on, systems like that described above, subject to some limitations (like not being able to record one show while watching another). It seems wise to strengthen the "your system must POST" requirement to say that "your system must be in a state in which it can boot from BOTH internal and external media". It doesn't matter if that means booting to a GRUB prompt, a shell prompt, or a full desktop. The system HAS to be able to load a kernel (1) in order to boot the installation media and (2) in order for the system to be able to boot itself after the OS is installed. So this is a fair requirement. Booting from CD or floppy as a matter of course, while possible, is easily sufficiently hacky to exclude it from the scope of a MythTV InstallFest. The FC6 installer, anaconda, has lots of bugs. We should consider using something else. 192 MB of RAM is sufficient to install and run a (barely) usable MythTV box, but is *insufficient* for the FC6 installer to run properly. 600 MHz PIII is sufficient to install and run a (barely) usable MythTV box. We can expect to regularly encounter GRUB problems. Most "glitches" encountered come from installing the base system, and not installing/configuring the MythTV suite. When downloading channel information, WAIT for the button to BLINK. Performing "custom" or "server" installs can reduce install complexity, reduce the time required to install the OS, reduce the time required to apply updates, dramatically reduce the disk space required, reduce the complexity of the resulting system, and reduce the likelihood of something going wrong either during the install or in the installed system. A DVD-ROM drive is not necessary for a smooth installation. Some CDR drives can't read reliably black CDR media. People will have to leave their pride at home for this. Getting pissed at the person who's helping you, or at the person whom you're helping, won't help the software get installed. The Three Noble Attributes of humility, patience, and competence are all going to be necessary for smooth InstallFestation. While it is definitely possible to install MythTV to lower-end systems, it may require considerable Linux know-how, and in higher doses than for the higher-end systems. The following can be added to our list of acceptable hardware: * bt878 based capture cards * 82810E based video cards In fact, for use with standard definition TV, I think it's probably safe to include any video card with functioning xv support in our hardware compatibility list. This would open up the InstallFest to many more people, with much more easily affordable hardware. After all, the real bottlenecks to MythTV installation and use seem to be RAM and CPU power, respectively. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-org mailing list gnhlug-org@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-org/
