Best distro for MythTV?

[scottws]

I am considering making a MythTV box out of an old PIII-733 HP that I have*, and I was wondering what distro I should use?

The author of the Anandtech guide used SuSE, but he plainly said it wasn't the ideal OS to use for that purpose and seemed to run into a few problems in the setup.

I intend to use this box soley as MythTV box. Basically once it is set up, I don't want to mess with it anymore, though it is possible I may use it as a file server in the future w/ Samba.

It seems that there are a lot of guides for MythTV out there regarding Fedora Core, but I've never had much luck with rpm and would therefore like to avoid a Red Hat-based distro. Right now I'm leaning towards Debian because I've used Ubuntu and like apt, but don't like how the root user is hidden and you sudo everything.

Someone in one of my classes suggested FreeBSD because it doesn't have all the library incompatibilities that you have with GNU/Linux, that things are sort of standardized. I've never used FreeBSD and honestly know next to nothing about it other than it's a free version of the BSD Unix.

My biggest consideration is ease of setup. I want to be able to get MythTV working with a minimum of effort. Another consideration is wireless and WPA w/ AES support. The box will be in a location that will require a wireless adapter. That's fine, I have a wireless router, but I use the seemingly less common and less supported WPA protection mechanism, with the AES cypher. So I need to be able to get that working to, with a minimum of hassle.

Oh, I have a cable box too. Is that a problem?

Any opinions?

* I realize that, ideally, you should have a relatively modern CPU. But I'm going to get a Hauppauge PVR-350, which has MPEG-2 hardware encoding capability built-in, so my CPU shouldn't matter too much.

 

[sourceninja]

I did mine with gentoo, it was really easy to setup.

 

[scottws]

Gentoo... that's the distro where you have to compile everything yourself, right? I'd prefer to avoid that. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

 

[sourceninja]

you dont compile everything for yourself, the OS downloads and compiles things for you. The 1337 crowd wants people to think gentoo is harder then fedora because it compiles. But really its no different then any other distro. Plus if the compile times bother you then you can always tell it to download binarys instead. But you need to use what you are comfortable with. The main reason I like gentoo is the wealth of gentoo information out there and the ablity to be cutting edge on software.

You might be able to use the gentoo wiki for your project though http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Setup_MythTV

 

[Zelmo3]

Get KnoppMyth. It's a distro custom tailored to run MythTV as easily as possible.

 

[Ausm]

I would suggest Mepis

Ausm

 

[skyking]

I've done it with RH9 and debian. The available documentation was good.
At the time, the knoppmyth release was broken in a few places, and I was not patient enough to fix it all. It might be fixed now, or at least I hope so.

 

[doan]

Originally posted by: Zelmo3
Get KnoppMyth. It's a distro custom tailored to run MythTV as easily as possible.

 

[DaiShan]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
you dont compile everything for yourself, the OS downloads and compiles things for you. The 1337 crowd wants people to think gentoo is harder then fedora because it compiles. But really its no different then any other distro. Plus if the compile times bother you then you can always tell it to download binarys instead. But you need to use what you are comfortable with. The main reason I like gentoo is the wealth of gentoo information out there and the ablity to be cutting edge on software.

You might be able to use the gentoo wiki for your project though http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Setup_MythTV

Heh, I was going to post the exact same link. Gentoo has portage, 'nuff said besides, you set up all of your compile time options when you install in make.conf (well you can set custom flags in package.use, but it isn't necessary) gentoo-wiki was an invaluable resource to me as I was learning linux/gentoo, they just have some really great walk-throughs, and the install docs for gentoo are extremely lucid.

 

[drag]

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

Fedora Core for mythtv. It's the most complete and usefull documentation for installing Mythtv on any GNU/Linunx system that I know of.

Otherwise I like Debian for Mythtv.
Partially because I like watching TV rather then compiling software, but also becuase I and a freak and prefer Debian for most everything.

 

[Crusty]

I set mine up with Ubuntu in just under an hour or so on a pIII 1ghz and PVR-250 card.

There are some great guides in the Ubuntu forums.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: drag
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

Fedora Core for mythtv. It's the most complete and usefull documentation for installing Mythtv on any GNU/Linunx system that I know of.

Otherwise I like Debian for Mythtv.
Partially because I like watching TV rather then compiling software, but also becuase I and a freak and prefer Debian for most everything.

That's because Debian is (imho) the easist linux distro to maintain/use.

WPA with AES encryption is WPA2, not sure on support for that in Linux, I've never used more then WEP

 

[Looney]

Ubuntu is fine if you're familiar with it. sudo'ing everything isn't a problem, because once you set it up, there's very little maintenance.

 

[scottws]

Originally posted by: nweaver
WPA with AES encryption is WPA2, not sure on support for that in Linux, I've never used more then WEP

Looks like I need the WPA Supplicant and a driver that the WPA Supplicant supports for WPA2.

 

[patrick24601]

scottws what ever happened on this?

 

[TonyRic]

scottws what direction did you go with this?

 

[Seeruk]

Woah is me I shoulda looked here before this weekend's distro nightmares

 

[PeteRoy]

asd

 

[aceO07]

While we have a few mythtv people in this thread, I'm curious if mythtv is an application or the main function of the linux distro. I'd like to have mythtv but I'd want to also use linux for everything else too.

 

[patrick24601]

Both.

MythTV is an application that you can download and install. At the same time there are distros (like KnoppMyth) that are created with myth already installed and configured. I am sure you can use KNoppyMyth for regular day to day work also.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: aceO07
While we have a few mythtv people in this thread, I'm curious if mythtv is an application or the main function of the linux distro. I'd like to have mythtv but I'd want to also use linux for everything else too.

Myth is just an application. You start it up only when you want to watch TV or use any of the other MythTV functions, and use your computer as a normal linux desktop when it's not running. It's pretty obtrusive though, when it is running, I don't think you can really watch tv WHILE doing other things. Personally I prefer VLC (also called VideoLan) to watch TV because it just runs in a regular window and you can be browsing the web, using OpenOffice, or doing whatever with the tv in a window.

edit: some guides will tell you how to have the desktop automatically log on and start MythTV so your computer basically becomes a dedicated MythTV box, but there is no reason you have to do it that way. You can just leave it as a normal app that you start only when you want it.