I cried, I wailed, I got the shits. I wanted to throw this box over my balcony and watch it smash in to a million little pieces. But now, its working!!!

Initially I was using knoppmyth. Its supposed to make life easier when it comes to installing mythtv. Well, for mythtv yes. If you use hardware that’s different from the developer though, life will be very difficult.

In the end, I installed ubuntu and apt-get’ed all the myth packages. I must point out though, that when I started this goal, mythtv was at version 0.18. Its now at 0.20, which has progressed in leaps and bounds in terms of ease of setup.

Ubuntu linux did help with my hardware though. The DVB tuner which I had just seriously wouldn’t work, at all under knoppmyth. I installed ubuntu linux, and bamm, it worked. That was a lesson learnt. And also knoppmyth did something weird when it formatted one of my large filesystems. The filesystem would say it was out of space, even when there was more than 50% free. Something to do with the maximum number of files on a filesystem. I reformatted that partition under ubuntu linux, and its been all good since then.

I’ve got two tuner cards in my mythtv box and it happily records on one while I watch on the other. And all the videos that I’ve downloaded look fantastic on on HD LCD screen.

Now that I’ve got a fully functional mythtv box, it was worth all the pain.