stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley

MythTV Chapter Ready: The Hard Way: Installing MythTV From Source

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:30:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

The Hard Way: Installing MythTV From Source is now ready. In fact, its been ready for quite a while, but I have been trying to blog about the finished chapters in the right order, so it has been trapped in the queue. This chapter discusses how to compile MythTV from source code, which is useful if you've either had problems with a packaged version of MythTV, or want more control than you'll get from packages.

The awesome Michael Carden did the review for this chapter once again.

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How I plan on handling Ubuntu and Mythbuntu 9.04

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

Ubuntu and Mythbuntu 9.04 have recently been released, and this makes some of the current content for the online MythTV book out of date. The way I plan on handling this is to keep going with the current version 8.10 content, and then update chapters to 9.04 later. This way I don't delay the overall book because of the new release, and people who haven't upgraded still have relevant content. For those using 9.04, the current content should be "close enough" to get you going. Please comment on this post if you see problems which are new to 9.04 so I can make a note of them.

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MythTV Chapter Ready: The Hard Way: Installing Ubuntu

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:58:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

The next chapter, The Hard Way: Installing Ubuntu is now ready. This chapter took a lot longer than I wanted because I was distracted by some stuff in my personal life, but I am hoping that the authoring process is now back on track. This chapter covers how to install Ubuntu so that you can setup your own MythTV system exactly how you'd like it. That's also the way to go if you're using an existing Ubuntu system and just adding MythTV to it.

Thanks to Michael Carden for yet another excellent chapter review.

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Restricting anonymous edits

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:23:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

Because of two examples of wiki spam today, I am restricting anonymous edits. From now on you will be required to have a wiki account before you can make an edit. That doesn't seem all that onerous to me, and lets me avoid having to deal with spam.

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MythTV Chapter Ready: The Easy Way: Installing MythBuntu

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:42:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

The The Easy Way: Installing MythBuntu chapter is now ready. This chapter provides an overview of a basic MythBuntu installation, which is something which wasn't covered at all in Practical MythTV, as MythBuntu wasn't ready at the time. MythBuntu provides a simple installation and configuration option for those people who want to build a new MythTV system from scratch, and want to hide the normal Ubuntu install.

Thanks to Michael Carden and Jost Stewart for their reviews of this chapter, as well as Paul Wayper for his comments.

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Looking for a logo

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:10:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

I'm not a very graphical person, so I'm looking for someone to help me with a logo for the online MythTV book project -- specifically I need something to replace this image:

I hope you agree that the current logo lacks a certain... something. A simple logo which somehow says "book about MythTV" would be really cool. It would also be good to have a version which works as a favicon.

Please email me if you think you can help.

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MythTV Chapter Ready: Selecting Hardware

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:03:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

The Selecting Hardware chapter is now ready. This chapter details the benefits of starting small, how to select the right hardware for a MythTV system if you're building one from scratch, and what the authors use for their MythTV systems.

This chapter was originally written by Stewart Smith, and this version was reviewed by Josh Stewart. Thanks as well to Julien Goodwin and Michael Carden for their helpful comments.

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MythTV Chapter Ready: Introduction

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:28:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

The Introduction chapter of the online MythTV book is now ready. This chapter covers the definition of a personal video recorder (PVR), the components of such a system, the various alternatives that are available, why MythTV might be the right choice, and briefly explains the MythTV version number scheme.

Thanks to Michael Carden for doing a review on this chapter.

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Introducing the online MythTV book

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:21:00 GMT

This post is syndicated from online MythTV book blog.

When parts of the first edition of the MythTV book became out of date, I decided to take the book online and ask others to help me improve it and bring it up to date. There is a blog for announcements, at http://mythtvbook.com/blog and if you're interested in helping out, please visit the Help Wanted page.

This book does not aim to be a complete reference to MythTV or a guide for how to develop plug-in modules for MythTV. Although we include a brief overview of the major features of MythTV, we explore only those parts of MythTV that are relevant to the projects in this book, which will include all the parts of MythTV that an average user will be interested in. It will also give you an excellent grounding for further projects with MythTV as well. This book is intended as a hobbyist's project guide, providing suggestions about what sort of projects you could take on and how we went about implementing our own versions of those projects.

Instead of including exhaustive coverage of features that few people use, we'll provide pointers to how to find out about those features, and we'll cover the 80 percent of MythTV's functionality that everyone will find useful. That way, this book will be genuinely useful to people setting up MythTV, instead of being a boring reference manual.

However, because the book is a wiki, anyone can add content if they want to. If there is genuine interest in the book being something other than what I envisage, then that is fine. The only barrier I have imposed is that chapters which become "official" (in other words are listed in the table of contents on the front page of the wiki) must go through both a technical review and a copy edit review. This will ensure that they're technically accurate, as well as being sufficiently well written. I am applying the same review criteria to my own chapters as well. I like to think of this as much like a code review before a patch is committed to an open source project.

You can follow along with the progress of the project at the current events page, and if you're interested in helping with the authoring or review process, I suggest that you join the editors mailing list, which is much like the core developers list for a coding project.

This is the first time I've tried a collaborative authoring project like this before, so I am very open to suggestions and comments. Additionally, I'd love some help getting the work done, and wouldn't mind some help with graphic design tasks as well.

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init script

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:53:00 PST

Jake Graft pointed out in a comment that I had forgotten to put the init script from the MythTV book online. My apologies.

#! /bin/sh
#
# mythbackend
#

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

BACKEND=/usr/local/bin/mythbackend
BACKEND_NAME=mythbackend

MYTHUSER="myth"

test -x $BACKEND || exit 0

set -e

case "$1" in
  start)
        echo -n "Starting MythTV: $BACKEND_NAME"
        su ${MYTHUSER} -c "$BACKEND -v all -d -l ${MBE_LOGFILE}" &
        echo "."
        ;;
  stop)
        echo -n "Stopping MythTV: $BACKEND_NAME"
        killall $BACKEND
        echo "."
        ;;
  *)
        echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

exit 0

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The book is doing ok

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:43:00 PST

I must say I am pleased with the Amazon rank for the MythTV book. The ranks seem volatile though -- the other day it was doing well in "Linux books", now its doing well in "video books".

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Illegal download sites for the MythTV book

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 09:43:00 PST

In the last week, I have discovered three download sites offering illegal downloads of the MythTV book e-book. If I can find three without really trying, I assume there are a lot more of them out there. This raises a question for which I don't have a good answer. Do illegal downloads of books increase, or decrease sales? I can see arguments either way, but I'm tending towards the belief that they don't increase sales.

Does anyone out there have any data which isn't merely anecdotal? Want to share it?

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More reviews

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 18:41:00 PST

I just got back from a lovely four days in Tasmania, and am just now catching up with the resulting email backlog. There are some new alerts about reviews of the MythTV book in there which are worth pointing out:

I'm surprised and disappointed that the installation of MythTV through pre-built packages or a CD distributions like KnoppMyth or MythDora were not covered deeper than a sentence or two in passing. This is likely to be a turn off for readers who were hoping for a quick and simple method of getting MythTV up and going.

...

On the whole I consider this a good book that is excellent for the new to intermediate MythTV user, although advanced users may pick a few good pieces of information out of it as well. It was well written and covered most items at just about the right introductory (yes -- practical) level. Once it has taught you the basics, you can then go and look up more details online for features you want to get more information about.

http://www.mythpvr.com/mythtv/books/Practical_MythTV.html
Linked at: http://smart-home-blog.com/archives/670
Linked at: http://mythtvnews.com/2007/06/29/more-practical-mythtv-book-reviews/

I think the comments about installation technique are fair, although the method described in the book is very likely to result in a nicely working MythTV system, which was not true for the MythTV packages that shipped with Ubuntu at the time of writing (they were a quite old version). Additionally, if you already have a Linux system you want to add MythTV to, then the way described in the book is better than the CD distributions because it doesn't involve a reinstall. I think it's horses for courses -- CD distributions are better for new users, but not for advanced users.

I'll add coverage of CD distributions to my TODO list of things to cover here sometime in the future.

Another review:

My main concern would be the assumption of prior Linux knowledge. The introduction states you need limited or no experience with Linux or Unix. I think that in this case, some time should have been taken to introduce complete Linux newcomers into the Ubuntu environment, which is something that wasn't touched on an awful lot. The installation of Ubuntu was well-covered and is generally a very simple process, but after that not much time was given to familiarise the user with the Ubuntu environment used throughout the book.

The rest of the book is extremely well written, clear and is a very good companion to MythTV. True to its name, it takes a practical approach to solving problems and if you're a Linux user interested in setting up a MythTV installation, it will make a very good resource.

http://fosswire.com/2007/07/11/book-review-practical-mythtv/

Again, it is fair comment to say that we don't spend much time introducing Ubuntu apart from the bits needed to get MythTV working (we talk about installing Ubuntu on bare metal, apt, packages, LVM, disk resizing and so forth). Then again, I imagine that most people who build a PVR machine for their living room only run the PVR software on the machine, and don't tend to use the machine as a general purpose system. After all, who wants to write email on a TV sitting on the couch? Laptops are much better for that. There are also many excellent Ubuntu and Debian books out there already, so it would be a shame to lose focus on our core content and try to be too general. For those needing a more complete Ubuntu introduction I highly recommend Beginning Ubuntu, The Official Ubuntu Book and Ubuntu Hacks.

So, I'm going to chalk that up as two positive reviews, both with useful comments to consider for next time.

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Review

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:37:00 PST

"If you're interested in setting up a PVR, then this is definitely a book to check out. Apress sells the paper version for $30, and offers an eBook for $15. Amazon offers it for $19.79, but I doubt that price will last long. I definitely give this book a 5 out of 5..."

http://www.yeraze.com/article.php/20070603160650701

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Book printed!

Fri, 04 May 2007 13:46:00 PST

I got off the phone with Catherine a few hours ago, and apparently my copies of the book have arrived at home (I'm in Dublin for work at the moment). That's very exciting. Looks like now would be a good time to buy it, while it's shipping soon and still on special.

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Status

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 15:42:00 PST

The book went to print two days ago. Now we wait for it to come back...

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Done and done

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:44:00 PST

Stewart finished off the last trailing chapter of the MythTV book a week or so ago, and I finished the last copy edit (the process where we learn US grammar) just now. That means we only need to have page layout done for a chapter or so and we're home. Hurrah!

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Time for a status update?

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 17:49:00 PST

It's been a while since I've commented on the MythTV book project, so it's worth a quick status update. We're basically into the home straight now -- we've decided what to cover in the book (which of course involves missing out on a few things which could be in there if we had infinite space and time), written the chapters (which are all now done), and are now working through technical review and copy edits.

I'll keep you posted as we get closer to final production.

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Book status

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 11:00:00 PST

I was thinking about the delivery status of the MythTV book as I was going off to sleep last night, and it occurred to me that the book is pretty much done. It's a good feeling.

Stewart needs to finish poking a chapter on cut lists and so forth, with should be minimal effort, then he needs to work on chapters on MythWeb and VoIP (the VoIP one is half done). I need to write an updated introduction (the contents of the book have deviated from plan, although that always happens) as well as a short conclusion chapter, and help Stewart write a chapter about running the latest and greatest version of the code (and how to interact with the development community).

Then we're done for the writing. That description can be summarised as "Stewart and I appear to both be about one and a half chapters away from finishing authoring".

We of course still need to get through technical review, editorial review, replying to things those reviewers need changed, copy editing, page layout, and standing on one leg. We're getting towards the end of the project though.

When I think about it that way, I guess I read the ImageMagick book around four or five times.

You can pre order a copy of the MythTV book from Amazon for $20 US.

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Cat, bag, out

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:45:00 PST

So, I guess the cat is out of the bag then... Stewart and I are working on the finishing stages of a book on MythTV. Amazon now has it listed for pre-order.

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