User Feedback :: How do you run DSL ?



sasho, a howto on how you have mythtv working in DSL would be most excellent!  :)

Chris
More or less, it consisted of the following:
1) Download and install the following extensions (there are howtos on how to install some of them, ex. alsa):
alsadebs, gnu-utils, codecpak, xfree86, nvidia (I have an nvidia-based card).

2) Enable apt-get and have (at least)  these repositories in  /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
deb http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian unstable mythtv

3) Update the list of available packages with:
apt-get update

4) Run "apt-get install mythfrontend" to install the frontend component for mythtv.

5) If you want to install lirc, install the kernel sources, then run "apt-get install lirc lirc-modules-source".  

6) Follow the prompts to install the appropriate lirc module according to the type of your remote control (serial, bttv card, etc).

This is a rough overview of how I did it. Note that this is only the frontend, for the backend "mythbackend" needs to be installed along with mysql, and a tv tuner card will need to be configured. The mythtv website has good documentation with good notes for debian.

During my install, lirc was the hardest element to install, mythfrontend itself was quite painless.

No screenshot section on the boards?
I use the liveCD since I don't really know my way 'round dsl yet. I boot toram with 2 usb thumb drives connected since I don't know how to umount and remount the usbs properly yet and wind up with dsl not seeing any thumb drive(s) again for the session. That way, I can free up the cd-rom to play my dvds. :D
the way i installed DSL on my ancint laptop is i have one partition for a frugal install and another for the HD install. the reasoning being i have no CD drive so i figure a frugal would be good to have for recovering when i mess up the HD install.

the install is kinda quirky. the way that the grub loaders conflict with each other is really weird. i had setup a partition i wanted to use as a boot partition, but the way gub installed it looks like it just points to the grub loader that frugal installed. to boot up the HD install i have to have the kernel point to the one on the frugal partition  and the root on the HD partition. AFAICT it doesn't logically make sense, but the verbose an performance difference support that each are doing their own thing properly. i'm planning to eventually migrate grub to the boot partition and load each kernel off its own partition.

for my HD install i'm also experimenting with the initNG script, which is half-working and in many ways broken. i'm not sure how many of my problems with it are DSL specific and how many are related to my bizarre setup. in any case, i'm having fun learning more about linux, being mostly inept and all.

P.S. for those interested, the broken initNG script reduces the linux portion (from grub selection to the start of the DM) of my boot time from 100 seconds to just 26 seconds. mind you when it boots; the network, restart, and shutdown don't work and who knows what else.. so i expect it should really take ~50 seconds for DSL to boot properly, but it's hard to say since i don't know that much. it's just fun as a pet project trying to get DSL and initNG to work together. halving the boot time on a low-end machine just makes a lot of sense, even if it's early beta for the script

P.P.S. sorry if you actually bothered to read all that, i just wanted to reflect a bit on my DSL experience for myself
I use frugal on HD.
And frugal on HD in vmware. ;)
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