Slackr

You may have noticed an absence of posts here recently. Mainly, this is because I'm a slackr (slacker - but with the 'new' way of spelling). What should I have been posting here? I should have been posting about the setup of my VFD, or the final programming of my remote, or the fixes to get my wireless settings to stick... but, I didn't. Do you know why? Because I didn't do any of those things, instead, I got the engine running, and decided that a sun-roof, and air-conditioning, and an alarm system weren't that important, I'd do them later (a.k.a. those were all bells and whistles that I would at some point put in).

Well, now I will be posting a bit more. As many of you know (and many of you might not), Zap2It is now gonzo from a scheduling point of view... so, we in the world of Myth are all franticly swinging over to Schedules Direct for our listings (also, it is a pay service, not free as Zap was, but it isn't too costly).

This is the cause of what will be some activity. I attempted to update to the new scheduling system, when a "world of hurt" came raining down on the Vegan Myth. The first attempt at implementing the schedules direct fix caused my recording system to no longer function (I could watch live tv, and my old recorded shows, but could record no more). It seems that something happened to my database to lock me out of recording, also, no new schedule info was working. My second attempt caused the video capture to go belly up, so I could now record, and get the new listings, but I could only record static (snow). Funny thing though, if I did a cat to file of the video (cat /dev/video0 > test.mpg), then played it back through VLC, it was fine. So, the device was functioning, but just not within Myth.

I worked furiously over this last week to get all back to normal, and after playing with the ivtv settings, thought I had it... in fact, I had (for about 30 seconds) real video playing through Myth again. I setup a recording to test it, and went to bed.... the next day, I tried to watch the recording, and it was just "white screen"... not even snow. THEN, I noticed that the cat to file from the device was also just white. I conferred with my resident Myth expert, and we determined that the ivtv install was not properly matched to my kernel, so I upgraded that to 0.10.5... this blew away my Nvidia drivers, and my x server no longer worked...

To fix the 'x' issues, I had to modify my xorg.conf file to remove the nvidia driver (which used to work), and put in the 'nv' driver... this works, but not in Myth. I removed and reinstalled the NVidia drivers, which (once again) blew up my x server... After fumbling around again, I was able to restore back to a working system (sans Myth).

SO, now I am reinstalling from scratch... I will post on this episode later. FIRST though, I backed all my recordings and videos to an external drive, as well as backing up the MySQL mythconverg database.

The lessons I've learned:

1) being a slackr may have been good... I didn't waste any time setting up stuff only to have it blown away
2) maybe if I wasn't a slackr, I wouldn't have screwed up my upgrade...

Must return to the Myth re-install now...

VG