Ed's World

This post is not intended to be interesting, just a list of useful steps/links for setting up an Acer Revo with Ubuntu and MythTV (and is probably already out of date)

I have two TV cards – a Hauppage WinTV NOVA TD with Diversity (dual tuner freeview) and a TeVii S660 Freesat receiver (primarily for HD).

Installing
Downloaded the latest Ubuntu ISO (10.10) and used existing Ubuntu to turn a USB disk into a startup disk. Worked a treat.

Fed up with sudo password…
sudo vi /etc/sudoers, and change the line:
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
to
%admin ALL=NOPASSWD:ALL
This gives me sudo access with no need for a password.

Non-free drivers
System > Administration > Additional drivers
Installed both the nvidia and DVB drivers.

Installing packages
System > Adminstration > Synaptic Package Manager
Search for mythtv, mythweb, mythvideo and install them all.
I also grabbed phpmyadmin for managing the mysql database.

TeVii S660
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9927773&postcount=32 – that has a link to a modified driver that works on Ubuntu 10.10. Unzip the zip, and then execute run “bash README” which executes all the commands in the README file. Turn off the machine (must turn it off, not restart it), wait a few seconds, then turn it on.

Consistent USB Device numbers
Depending on all things random, a device that reports as /dev/dvb/adapter0 now may end up as /dev/dvb/adapter1 on the next reboot (assuming you have dual tuners/multiple cards). I found udev rules didn’t work – it’d link two new adapters to the second adapter each time. However, creating /etc/modprobe.d/dvb.conf and putting “options dvb_usb_dib0700 adapter_nr=5,6″ means that the freeview tuners will always be adapter5 and adapter6, leaving the freesat tuner as adapter0 (by default).

MythTV
First, the system taskbar doesn’t vanish when running mythtv in fullscreen. To fix this – System > Pref > Appearance > Visual Effect = None

Run mythtv-setup. If it can’t connect to database, the password can be found in ~mythtv/.mythtv/mysql.txt

grano.la
Grano.la is a beautifully simple way to save money by scaling CPU appropriately – http://grano.la/

Thanks to @ceejay, here’s some code to set up serial parameters and read from the serial device. Bizarrely the usual method stopped working after an update.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Device::SerialPort;

while (1) {
my $val = ;
next unless $val;
chomp $val;
print $val . "\n";
#sleep 1;
}
# die if port closes/goes away