Dom Barnes

MythTV Day 4/5

Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | gagdets

Day 4

I’ve made some progress since my last blog post. I was having issues with installing Ubuntu while hooked up to TV via the TV-out port on my ATI Radeon 7000. So I went over to my gf’s parents house and hooked the machine up to an LCD monitor. I have a bit more sucess this time. I got the installer working.
I was using the alternative install for my install as i didn’t need the LiveCD part. I booted up, and started to go through the install process. I got as far as copying and setting up the system and then it hung at 6% progress. I waited and finally got an error message which was no help at all. I tried once again and got the same thing.
This whole process took about 30 mins each time so I had just wasted an hour on this. My only solution was to go home and look into things.

After a bit of googling I found a possible issue. It might’ve been a bad burn. I checked my MD5 checksums on the ISO and CD after burning and had no issues. They were fine. I decided that I would try the 8.06 beta version as well. So I downloaded the ISO via BitTorrent (one of the many LEGAL uses!) and did a trial install in VMWare on my Macbook Pro. It went fine so I burnt a disc.

Day 5
Back at Katie’s parents house now. Trying the disc I just burnt. After a long wait, still no luck. Failed. So I tried one last thing. It was suggested that sometimes fast CD burns can cause problems, so I quickly burnt a new version of the 8.06 beta onto a CD with Disk Utility, this time selecting a 10X burn speed compared to the normal 24X.
I waited for the burn to finish and booted off the disc. All I can say is the difference was very noticable. The boot was a lot quicker this time. I launched the LiveCD and installed from there. Install didn’t take that long and I was soon happy to be greated by the Ubuntu login screen.

By this time it was late and almost time to go home. I did a quick update and also turned on VNC so I could manage this from remote.

I got home, and hooked the PC up to the TV again. No signal what so ever. So I fired up Chicken of the VNC and tried to log on. Now, I had reason to think it should work. I tried it back at the other house, and had no trouble. But for some reason, back home there was no luck.

So now I’m stuck again. I’ve bought a VGA to S-video and composite cable from eBay and will hopefully be able to get a picture on screen with that, at least long enough to get auto login set up and vnc working. Once thats done, I’ll get MythTV installed and get working.
I also need to get a new hard drive. I’ve got a 40GB drive in there now, and obviously need a bigger one. I’ll probably get a 200GB drive, and maybe clone Ubuntu across to it rather than clean install. That then gives me a a spare IDE connection for another drive.

Again we wait to fix unforseen issues.

Tags: mythtv, ubuntu

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