Now that my system has some reasonable hard drive, I’ve been working on other bells and whistles with MythTV. After the 0.17 upgrade I found that my remote no longer worked, mainly because I forgot to tell Myth to compile with LIRC support. I decided since I was flubbing around, I might as well upgrade my system kernel to the K7 kernel (my mythbox is an Athlon 700). This went well, but somewhere along the line (I think before the upgrade) the alsa drivers for my SB!Live card got toasted. Oddly enough, I can load the driver, but I don’t get any sound out of the system. If I unload the snd_emu10k1 driver and stop alsa and load the OSS emu10k1 then stuff seems to work okay in OSS mode. Still a pain. Because the system is basically only a Myth Box this should work okay.
Long story short on all these problems is that I need to document what I’ve been doing better. Specifically the fact that I’m not using the LIRC kernel driver for my remote, I’m using the Linux input layer. This caused me endless frustration especially when I saw that LIRC refused to create valid kernel modules for the system.
I also hacked around some of my startup scripts so the system is dead simple to use now. Basically when the computer starts up it starts a GDM session first, and another XSession just for Myth afterwards. I’ll post some of that on how I did it in my tutorials section sometime next week.
With regards to 0.17, it’s quite nice. I especially like the time speedup option for viewing programs. While 1.5x starts to be a little annoying, watching Conan at 1.2x normal speed is really nice.