Last night I had one of those tinkering fits that occasionally over take me, and I updated my mythtv operating system to openSUSE 11.1. Since there aren’t any really good instructions for this procedure (even the mythtv wiki is a bit stretched), I figured I’ll post my instructions here.

My backend (and frontend) machine:

• Pentium D 920
• 1Gb Ram
• Hauppauge PVR-350
• 900 Gb hardware RAID 5 (4 x 300 Gb) with Areca ARC-1210 controller
• Geforce 7300 GS

With the exception of the video, all the components in the machine here have good out of the box drivers.

Anyways, I chose the basic X11 installation from the DVD, since I wanted to avoid installing too much extraneous software.

The majority of the install is done from the command line so here goes (As best as I can remember):

zypper ar http://packman.unixheads.org/suse/11.1
zypper install mythtv-backend mythtv-doc myththemes mysql
rcmysql start && mysqladmin -u root password mysecretpassword

mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/packages/mythtv-doc/database/mc.sql

mysql -u root -p mythconverg
   grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"%" identified by "mythtv";
   flush privileges;
   quit;

Then with a running X session run the setup program, and there is plenty of documentation available for this on the mythtv wiki

mythtv-setup

Next I created a user “myth”, installed gdm, and configured the autologin, note that no password was set here for the user “myth”

useradd myth -m
zypper install gdm
sed s/DISPLAYMANAGER="xdm"/DISPLAYMANAGER="gdm" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager
sed s/DISPLAYMANAGER_AUTOLOGIN=""/DISPLAYMANAGER_AUTOLOGIN="myth" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager

Next I started yast and from the run level editor, I added both mythbackend and mysql to the start in run levels 3 and 5

Finally to get the frontend to display upon boot I edited the file /home/myth/.dmrc to read

[Desktop]
Session=mythTV

Restarted the machine to test all was well, and I was up and running.

Not bad, as far as time goes either. In total the installation took me about an hour and half.

-Ted