GFK's Palace

I'm really impressed with mythDora, I only had to pop the DVD in the drive and boot the PC and it worked on the first try! Well, not the first since I had screwed up my hard drive config, but it did on the second try! Well, not the second since the installed froze for no reason 20 minutes in the installation process, but it worked on the third try! Which is pretty good compared to my earlier experiences with KnoppMyth: about 15 failures to install in that many frustrating hours.

Here are the details of my PC:

• PC with Pentium 4 1.6 GHz with 512 MB RAM
• nVidia GeForce4 MX 440
• Fairly old PATA Sony DVD burner
• Brand new 250 GB PATA Western Digital Hard Drive
• Hauppauge PVR-250 that I bought years ago but was never able to use because I couldn't figure out how to install MythTV.

And I'm using this for satellite reception:

• Coolsat 6000 receiver hooked on two satellites.
• USB-UIRT IR blaster to control the Coolsat.

Everything was recognized automagically except for the USB-UIRT IR Blaster. The remote control that came with the Hauppauge PVR-250 didn't work at first because I had answered yes to the "Will you use an IR Blaster" question. I had to delete /etc/modprobe.d/irblaster and reboot and it worked fine.

IR Blaster

I had some troubles setting up the IR Blaster (USB-UIRT), but after a couple hours, I had it working. Here's a summary of how I did it:

ln /usr/sbin/lircd /usr/sbin/irblaster
cp /etc/init.d/lircd /etc/init.d/irblaster
wget http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/coolsat/Pro_4000 -O /etc/irblaster.conf

In /etc/init.d/irblaster, replace every instance of "lircd" by "irblaster". Then put this into /etc/sysconfig/irblaster:

IRBLASTER_OPTIONS=" --driver=usb_uirt_raw --device=/dev/ttyUSB0 --output=/dev/lircd1 --listen=8766 --pidfile=/var/run/irblaster.pid /etc/irblater.conf"

Then put the following into /usr/local/bin/change_chan.sh:

 
#!/bin/sh
REMOTE_NAME=Coolsat_Pro_4000
for digit in $(echo $1 | sed -e 's/./& /g'); do
 irsend --device=/dev/lircd1 SEND_ONCE $REMOTE_NAME $digit
 sleep 0.333
done
irsend --device=/dev/lircd1 SEND_ONCE $REMOTE_NAME O

I'm not sure why (and this is what gave me so much troubles), but I need to read from /dev/lircd1 for the irblaster to work. So I added irw /dev/lircd1 >/dev/null 2>&1 & in /etc/rc.d/rc.local. It's not very elegant, but it works...

Munin

I wanted to have a better idea of the ressources taken by MythTV, so I installed munin-node on the PVR. I already have a munin server on my LAN.

yum install munin-node 
echo "allow ^10\.10\.16\.2$" >> /etc/munin/munin-node.conf
/etc/init.d/munin-node start 

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 4949 -j ACCEPT
/etc/init.d/iptables restart