MythTV Reloaded – Day 2
As recently noted, I have decided to document my MythTV upgrade. To start things off, I will be upgrading my main MythTV server. The current system is running MythTV 0.21 on Fedora Core 7. The current version of MythTV is 0.24 at the time of this writing. This time around I will be building the backend around CentOS. The most recent version of CentOS is 6.0 at this time. The main reason that I’ve gone with CentOS is because both it and Fedora are based off of RedHat Enterprise Linux so the interaction is essentially the same between them. The other popular distribution these days seems to be Ubuntu and I considered going with it but that system is based on Debian Linux and there are a few nuances that I would have to learn. So I will be sticking with what I am familiar with.
To get things started I have downloaded the CentOS i386 DVD .iso file and burned it on a blank DVD. Booting from this DVD, I followed the distribution specific installation guide for Fedora (remember, CentOS and Fedora are both based on RedHat). Installation of the OS was very straight forward following this guide. There were a couple of small things that were different from the install guide however. For example, in the First Boot section there are no longer options for disabling the firewall or SE Linux. When it came time to choose a repository for MythTV I selected atrpms. This repository has worked well for me in the past so why reinvent the wheel? After that, it was a simple matter of stepping through the rest of the guide step by step. Since this is primarily a backend and not a frontend as well I skipped the section at the end on making Mythfrontend automatically launch. Also, there was no need to setup a remote because this system will always have a mouse and keyboard available to it.
At this point I had a basic MythTV installation running but I needed to get all of my previous recordings recognized. Everything was there since I had the recorded stuff on a separate hard drive but it was time to import the old database. Once that was completed, I launched the frontend locally to verify that everything copied correctly and was usable. There were a couple of sections of the database that needed to be updated once I launched the frontend the first time but once that was done everything appeared available and working.
This is as far as I’m going with it at the moment so I popped in the old hard drive so that the other systems could still access the MythTV backend and called it a night. So far, so good. No major interruptions to everyday activities.
Good luck on this. It’s one
Good luck on this. It’s one of those thankless tasks, doing upgrades, you are merely trying to get back to where you were, while still keeping things working. No one loves you if you cock it up 🙂 However running off another drives minimises the risks.
BTW are you actually documentating the changes you are making, for the next time 😉
There are a couple of new
There are a couple of new features that I’m trying to gain from this upgrade such as blu-ray support and being able to run the frontend on my Windows laptop. As I make any non-standard changes during the install process I will likely document it broadly in these blog posts and perhaps do a quick guide or article if it is warranted. But I’m trying to document as much as I can. That’s the whole reason that I’m doing this blog series in the first place. I don’t upgrade often but I’ve already found it helpful to refer to past experiences when doing these installs.