Guys -- we really have to take a deep breath here and figure out a new paradigm. This is like the 4th time my LinHES box has come up DEAD after an "upgrade". Every time I need to SSH into the darned thing and figger out what went wrong. All I wanted to do was sit down and see some Olympics and now I've got the dreaded "nVidia bug" which prevents my Xorg from starting. I saw a post where I can fix it by doing about a full evening of computer hacking to get a different nVidia driver on my box.

We need to stop pushing out stuff that we think will break existing users. It's getting hard to be enthusiastic about my LinHES box when it always seems to be going down because of some untested part. Like nVidia compatibility. (Which kind of astounds me, since I think about 80% of LinHES users use nVidia hardware). Yes, computers are my day job and I can handle an evening of getting sources, checking out mercurial repositories, compiling, etc. I just don't WANT to.

I want that simple "it-just-works" video appliance I saw in the brochure. Maybe it doesn't have EVERY feature and update, but it just sits there and does what it's supposed to do.

I apologize if this comes across as negative or unappreciative. Cecil and the old-timers know how much I appreciate their efforts. I guess if anything I'm asking for just a little LESS effort... not so many changes, please!

Joe Barnhart
a.k.a. Liv2Cod

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2 things
1) I'm there with you. My system doesn't "just upgrade" nicely. It's usually a huge headache for me so I'm still on 6.03 even though I have test installed 7.3 on my box.
2) Come on man Don't do an upgrade before a big recording! That's just common sense.
3) Don't try an upgrade before the Super Bowl.

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Joe

I understand your frustration, let's try and isolate the problem before assigning blame. I have a spare Atom PC that I'd like to run as front end on my Pioneer Pro-510HD. I had a few problems problems with XBMC that I was able to iron out on my Master Backend. I would be happy to give it run to see it we could iron out some of your hurdles. I find it helpful to document any changes that way I can reference them with the next upgrade.

Heh heh. All I did was come home and find it borked.

If only I hadn't checked that box that says "auto upgrade MythTV".

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So here's the resolution.

I used SSH to get in and poke around. Lots 'o errors regarding the mythconverg database, but for all I know those are "normal" since I hardly ever look at the backend logs. Xorg.log only says it failed to load. Clearly some sort of upgrade process has been performed, so I decide to do a reboot from the SSH terminal.

I wait a "normal" time for the reboot, but the disk light is still on solid and no joy over SSH. Uh-oh. I decide to wait it out -- I've seen fsck go on for a loooonng time before so I decide not to interrupt it and potentially water it off! After about 45 min my patience is rewarded. I SSH in and poke around -- this time the nVidia driver seems loaded and says it's found my display device. Happy days! Or?

I turn on the display and find a message that my mythconverg format is 35 versions old (?) and it tells me to consult with myth-backend. I press the "OK" button and I am rewarded with the LinHES penguin. From my SSH term I poke around in the logs and look for a hint of what to do next. With no hints forthcoming I decide to look at that message again so I do a "pkill xinit" to restart X.

This time the message is "select OK to upgrade database structure for music" or something similar. Now we're getting somewhere! I have an "OK" button to press which will actually fix something! I press it with bated breath.

Now I got the myth frontend up, checked my shows and found Olympics waiting to be watched. Self-correcting software saved my butt, so I guess I take back all those negative vibes about automatic updates screwing with my zen-like peaceful personality.

Anyone remenber how to turn off those automatic updates???

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Yes it's in the Linhes menu advanced settings I think it's called (where you setup samba). Got caught with that one checked as well.

Thinking about it, this update was quite large. Something like a years worth of changes. All the packages were upgraded. The myth converge schema update had a number of revisions. I've had some problems with backup completing. The first time i tried the upgrade, the backup completed correctly,.but the schema upgrade failed because my drive was almost full on sda3. I had to do a fresh install on another drive and then restore my backup. This took quite a while but thankfully it worked it out.......

my problem is that i have tinkered too much over the years. I want to start with a clean slate and only my essential items to carry over.

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