Linux – Page 6 – Life of a Developer

Distributed MythTV Support Script

It has been a long time since I had time to play with my MythTV setup, but now it finally works. It turns out that the biggest hurdle was not to split the functionality, nor to configure the channels (one just has to get one’s head around the way that MythTV looks at receivers, channels and providers…). The big hurdle was that one of my frontends are connected over WiFi.

The issue was that the frontend application was launched before the WiFi connection was established. This resulted in the frontend running some sort of configuration guide each time the system was booted. Having realized the source of the issue, disabled the autostarting of the frontend and added my own autostart script:

#!/bin/bash


TRIES=0
ping 192.168.1.201 -c 1

RES=$?
while [ "$RES" -ne "0" ]

do

  sleep 1

  ping 192.168.1.201 -c 1

  RES=$?
  let "TRIES+=1"

  if [ "$TRIES" -gt "100" ]

  then

    exit -1

  fi

done

mythfrontend --service

Here, 192.168.1.201 is the IP of the backend. The script ensures that the backend can be pinged before the frontend process is launched. The end result is a stable boot every time.

QtMobility Configuration

Just a small note. When you configure QtMobility, do not add a final dash at the end of your prefix path. This makes the directories of the install (include, lib, bin, etc) end up in your root, i.e. /include. Omitting the slash resolves this and keeps your root disk clean.

MythTV getting TV

For the last few months I’ve run a MythTV frontend/backend combination as our upstairs entertainment center. I use it for SVT Play using Tommy Persson’s excellent plugin, but also to play some music and act as a DVD player.

Yesterday a box arrived with my brand new Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-TD stick (from a sale on netonnet). Last time I fought with receiving TV through a Linux system, it was a proper struggle. This time, it was just a matter of plugging in the stick, setting up the MythTV backend and watch TV (I admit – I did spend a bit of time sorting and filtering channels, but nothing advanced).

Checking the system this morning, it had recorded all three shows I asked it to – on time. Even the ones colliding in time, i.e. requiring the dual tuners to be used. Very nice!

Now, all I have to do is to setup my dedicated backend machine and get the connection between it and the frontend working. If that goes smoothly, a card reader and soft CAM would be the next step, but boxer is charging 89+21 SEK per month for a twin card, so I guess that would mean setting up a new frontend downstairs…

MeeGo and Qt

In these turbulent times, I just wanted to share some bright news.

We’re hiring developers who want to work on MeeGo and Qt on the bleeding edge in a challenging industry. Check out our application page at http://pelagicore.com/careers/.

Make Skype Reliable

Recently, Skype seems to hang in some odd offline mode without indicating this. I run a fairly vanilla Kubuntu install so this ought affect more people out there. The remedy for this is a set of scripts available from the Skype Reliabilitator page. Now, you can simply run check-skype-status and Skype restarts if needed.