MythTV Setup (Part - 1)

Using a TV is something very trivial for everyone right now and for my roommate and I it was not fun at all. So, we built our "Uber Mega Cool Media Center" using MythTV and some pieces of hardware that was useless in the closet.
The MythTV hardware we have is :
- A WinFast K7S 741GXMG Motherboard holding an AMD Athlon XP 2400+
- 1024 MB of DDR333
- A SoundBlaster Live 5.1 that we use for the Digital Output on it
- An Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 MCE-kit for the TV-Tuner and the built-in Mpeg2 Encoder
- An NVIDIA Geforce 6200 256MB with TV-OUT
- A Wireless card Microsoft MN-730 which have a Broadcom chipset on it.
- And an LG DVD Writer
When we first tried to build the MediaCenter we tough that using Linux MCE would be a good idea... well we tried to install it during 2 days !!! So, we then tried KnoppMyth ... there was always a problem with the kind of automatic hardware detection and everything went wrong each time we tried. The KnoppMyth was even worse, it fails to boot after the installation !!!

So my roommate and I glare at each other, and since we are two Linux administrator in our past time, we decide to stop trying to use and integrated solution and to build our own !
We used Kubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 as a base system. We setup the Nvidia Proprietary Drivers for the graphics card, so we could have OpenGL acceleration for movie playback. It was so simple having everything working.

The remote that comes with the PVR is recognized using the driver lirc_mceusb2 so a simple modprobe did the job.

We then prepare our secondary disk to be mounted in " /media/data " because we will buy a new hard drive soon to replace the little 40Gig that holds our Movies for now and by doing a mount point it's easy in the configuration :)

We applied a so often forgotten philosophy... KISS which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid that practically always lead to a very simple and efficient solution.

We added those repository:

deb http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ feisty free non-free
deb-src http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ feisty free non-free

#added mythbuntu repos
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mythbuntu/ubuntu feisty multiverse universe restricted main

This gave us the package needed to enable the MP3, Codecs and cool stuff needed when you want to use an *buntu distribution with multimedia. The last one gave us some updated packages for MythTV.

Well for now I'll end it here but I should come more in details soon with screenshot and stuff. Anyway, it's so simple when you do it yourself and using the already made package that with the Hardware list in the beginning of this post you should be able to build your own right away.

Any question on some more specific aspect drop a comment I'll answer.