Thank you, Peter, for inspiring me to pick up where I left off with my MythTV project all those months ago.
I’d got so sick of failing and unpredictable hardware (as well as my own hamfistedness) that I’d shelved the project in disgust. Every time I’d remembered the pile of wasted hardware in the upstairs room, I would quickly try to forget about it once more.
That would have been a great shame, not to mention a huge waste of money, so I’m glad Peter persuaded me to look into it again. He messed with the hardware and localised one of the problems that had been dogging me: a dodgy power socket on the power-supply unit. It hadn’t been obvious to me, because it was providing power; just not reliably.
Peter had wanted to do more on the box the other day, but I wasn’t keen. I just wasn’t in the mood. Besides, thinking I was now past the worst of the hardware problems (and, more importantly, over the psychological hurdle of feeling ill every time I thought of the frustration the project had caused me earlier in the year), I reasoned that I would now soon feel the urge to go further on my own.
Well, that moment came last night. I mounted the floppy drive in its metal casing and screwed the DVD recorder back into its mount; then I seated and screwed those back into place in the case. Finally, I took my wireless LAN card out of my workstation and, along with the TV tuner card, inserted it into the new box.
Of course, all that disturbance inside the case caused the machine not to boot again, so I spent another frustrating couple of hours tracing the problem. I finally realised that not one, but two connectors on the power supply are dysfunctional. This made troubleshooting an order of magnitude harder, because as I unplugged things and tried reconnecting using different sockets, not one but sometimes two things would suddenly start or stop working.
Anyway, I now have all of the hardware working, but I have no spare power connectors left and there’s every possibility the entire power-supply unit will fail at some point, necessitating replacement. Nevertheless, to be this far along with the hardware is great.
And so I was able to install the operating system. Peter and I had done that once already when he got the box working, but I decided to reinstall it last night with fewer packages. I also opted to use JFS instead of XFS for the main /video file-system.
The system is now up and running, and fully updated to the latest errata packages. That allowed me to run yum to install the complete set of MythTV packages, which added a further hundred packages to the system. I’m glad I didn’t have to manually chase down and satisfy that dependency chain.
The work on configuring the TV card now begins. Watch this space.