Hi! I am only slightly familiar with Linux and Myth, but I am interested in doing more. Mainly, I haven't had a big need for Linux, but now I may.

I have an old Athlon 1 Ghz/ 512 RAM machine that I am setting up for my kids to play with. It has an 80 GB HDD that I put a 20 GB NTFS partition on w/ XP for them to use. The remaining 55 GB I would like to use as a PVR. I have a Geforce2 MX 64 MB graphics card and a Hauppage WinTV PVR PCI II card.

I would like to format the 2nd partition as Fat32 and dual-boot between XP and Linux/MythTV. The only info I found looks like I could install from a CD, but it would over-write my entire HDD, which I don't want to do at this point.

Another option I could live with is getting a small 2nd HDD for Windows and use the entire 80 GB for KnoppMyth, though how do I get a dual-boot option like that?

One other dumb question... I don't need to watch the recorded shows from my TV, my monitor would be fine. But does KnoppMyth give me the option of watching the shows while they are being recorded, or after, or to even just use the program to watch a show in progress without recording, from within Linux?

Thanks for any help!

Last question first: MythTV definitely lets you watch a show while it's recording it, as well as (of course) after it's done recording. Watching a show in progress equals "Live TV" to MythTV--it's basically recording at that point too, though, so you can do PVR-type things like pausing live TV, rewinding, etc. This does introduce some lag when changing channels that some people find annoying.

As for your dual-boot... if you're a newbie to Linux, setting up dual boot will probably be very frustrating. Do some searches here for "dual boot" (click the "include all terms" button) and find out the rigamarole you're getting yourself into. You'd probably be better off physically switching hard drives to boot Windows vs Linux/MythTV.

Moreover, the idea of a PVR is that it's on all the time, recording what you've asked it to. If your kids have booted over to your Windows partition to play a game tonight, your PVR will not be running so it can record tonight's episode of "Lost."

EDIT: here's a sample thread...

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... =dual+boot

Thanks for that info! I don't watch enough TV to need the PVR part all of the time, and my kids are too young to do anything with the PC by themselves, so a dual boot would be the best option for me (especially for cost...).

I'll see what I can do with that thread, thanks for pointing me to it!

Do you think my hardware is ok (Athlon 1 Ghz/ 512 RAM, 80 GB HDD, Geforce2 MX 64 MB graphics card and a Hauppage WinTV PVR PCI II card)?

Thanks!

What is a PVR PCI II? If it is a "software tuner", you may have issues watching live TV as that eats up CPU.

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cesman

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