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PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 8:01 pm 
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Joined: Wed Jul 19, 2006 12:36 pm
Posts: 24
I recently decided to upgrade to R06.01.00 because people have been saying wonderful things about it. I appreciate all of the effort that went into switching from Debian/Knoppix to Arch Linux under the hood, but I didn't realize that it would be running the exact same version of MythTV as R5.5 unless I throw all caution to the wind and switch to the SVN version of MythTV. Because of that (essentially nothing was gained through the upgrade) and several post-installation issues (described below) I am disappointed until an official LinHES with MythTV 0.22 is available (read: it has new features, better stability, and the service menu works).

I encountered the following issues:

- Since there is no upgrade guide, I had to guess the process. The "upgrade" install itself went reasonably well, except due to a permissions issue and possibly other unseen issues I wasn't sure if I needed to do a restore after booting into the new system.

- I did a restore, then corrected permissions under /myth. This might not have been the right thing to do, but things weren't working.

- MythWeather was working well under R5.5 after much tweaking in R5F27. It doesn't work at all now.

- It was a total pain to convert a background script I wrote (babysit-commflag.sh) to work with sv. I learned that killing any of the runsv processes may result in the immediate shutdown and power off of the machine. That's just not cool.

- When I went into Service Menu -> Network Settings and changed the hostname back to what I set in the upgrade, it failed pretty hard trying to convert everything in the MySQL database. Thankfully, no change was really necessary, so I killed it and things recovered.

- MythTV didn't launch except on the first boot, possibly because of the restore I did. I had to add "[startup] {/usr/LH/bin/LinHES-run}" to ~mythtv/.fluxbox/apps.

- My remote wasn't working anymore and it appears that irxevent and irexec needed to be launched differently. I restored the launch_irx.sh script so that my restored ~mythtv/.fluxbox/apps would launch it again. It didn't work after boot until I killed and restarted X. I commented out the call to irexec in /usr/LH/bin/LinHES-run and made it run launch_irx.sh, which seems to help.

- I had to comment out the "unclutter" command in /usr/LH/bin/LinHES-run because it screws up the mouse cursor. toggle-unclutter.sh only turns it off temporarily.

- xvattr doesn't exist anymore (referenced in /usr/LH/bin/LinHES-run and other places)

- xwit doesn't exist and haven't had time to locate the right package. xdotool seems to replace the functionality I needed (moving Firefox into the center of the screen because window managers just love to override absolute placement via a geometry argument.)

- My NVIDIA/TV combination has serious overscan issues, which I have been able to tame by shrinking the MythTV display and manually centering it. I let recordings fill the 1920x1080 screen and ignore the overscan. It's hard to read some of the settings or determine whether some checkboxes are ticked during the install, so I did a little guessing in places. Everything was running off the screen until I rebooted, restored my xorg.conf file, commented out the RgbPath line to make it work, and restored my R5.5 backup.

- Overall, the scripts behind launching MythTV and managing the system seem to be much more fragile in R6. I have no prior experience with Arch Linux, but I have decades of experience administering FreeBSD systems and about 3 years running Linux systems. For example, X.org doesn't restart automatically at times when I think it should (e.g., Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) and killing a runsv process halts the system.

I am putting the story of my experience out there so that people like me who are looking to upgrade for new features and better stability will know that it may not be time to upgrade yet. Perhaps my experience isn't typical or I did some bonehead things due to lack of documentation. All I know is that WAF has been reduced until I resolve some of these issues.

By the way, my dad has been begging me to build a system for him. Since I'm not even running on preferred hardware yet, I hesitate to build a machine I'm going to be expected to support from 1000 miles away. I wanted to see if R6 was going to require less tweaking and so far the answer is no.

I want to reiterate that I realize switching to Arch Linux has been a massive undertaking and the issues I am complaining about are very minor in comparison to what they could be. This is a change that will pay big dividends in the future. It just wasn't the wisest move for this happy R5.5 user to upgrade yet. Thank you everybody!

____________________________
MBE/FE running LinHES R06.01.00
Dell Dimension E510, dual core Intel Pentium D 2.80 GHz
3 GB RAM (upgraded from 1 GB due to NVIDIA/X11 leak)
NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT, 1920x1080@60Hz
2x 500GB Seagate ST3500630AS (SATA)
HDHomeRun (OTA), pcHDTV 5500 (OTA), PVR-500 (no longer in use)
MCEUSB remote


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 11:43 pm 
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Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2003 6:37 pm
Posts: 2659
Location: Whittier, Ca
I'd say some of what you experienced aren't typical. It would help us improve things if you opened a ticket (ot tickets) in flyspray for the issue(s) you encountered. A ticket per item please.


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 8:34 pm 
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Joined: Wed Jul 19, 2006 12:36 pm
Posts: 24
cecil wrote:
I'd say some of what you experienced aren't typical. It would help us improve things if you opened a ticket (ot tickets) in flyspray for the issue(s) you encountered. A ticket per item please.


Ok, I'll try to isolate what I can that hasn't already been reported and open tickets when I get some time to mess with it again.


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 8:38 am 
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Joined: Sat Mar 22, 2008 10:24 pm
Posts: 26
Location: Dsm, IA
chael wrote:
For example, X.org doesn't restart automatically at times when I think it should (e.g., Ctrl-Alt-Backspace)

I believe this was a change in the default behavior from upstream Xorg a while back.
In Debian you'd want (just an FYI for your non-Knoppmyth boxes..)
Code:
Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "DontZap"        "off"

in xorg.conf, but in Arch you'd want
Code:
Option  "XkbOptions" "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"

see http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Ctrl-Alt-Backspace_doesn.27t_exit_X


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 Post subject: Upgraded to R6.03.00
PostPosted: Fri Jan 28, 2011 10:47 am 
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Joined: Wed Jul 19, 2006 12:36 pm
Posts: 24
I finally upgraded to R6.03.00 about a month ago. This upgrade went pretty smoothly and the newer release of MythTV is appreciated. I am a little boggled as to why output from the pacman update step is suppressed, because I had a package issue that prevented proper upgrade and was silently hidden. I ended up hacking the upgrade script so that I could run it multiple times as I got further into the process.

A few small tweaks needed to be reapplied (disabling noclutter and switching to launch_irx.sh come to mind.) MythWeather was a problem once again, but deleting all screens and recreating seems to have solved the primary issue. The lack of weather.com maps and forecasts still bothers me, but at least it works.

Stability does not seem to have improved. My next step in debugging the fact that the machine reboots under heavy FE use from time to time (and tends to reboot 2-3 times in one day, then behave for a week) is to get a separate FE running. If the problems go away or follow the FE, at least I'll know where to look. Oddly, the reboot issue happened about once a month under R5.5 and increased to weekly under R6. That's odd because they were initially running the same release of MythTV. I don't fault LinHES for the stability issue because this machine is cobbled together. It could easily be an IRQ issue or poor driver support for some of the hardware.

As I re-read my original post, it might be worth mentioning that my dad successfully built a HTPC around Windows 7 Media Center with some guidance from me.


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