I installed Gentoo on a 400GB drive, Chaintech mb, 1GB memory, AMD Athon-XP, and got a stable system up and running.
Now when I started emerging IVTV, lirc, and MythTV, problems started occurring; I'm not really sure, but I think the MythTV emerge does some of the work for you, like creating the mythtv user; I'm using a 380GB partition mounted on /video. I have a PVR-350 & 500 in the unit, and support for the chips has to also be compiled into the kernel.
I think I was doing okay until I hit the point where no user, not even root, could run 'mythtv-setup' without getting a msg stating 'cannot connect to X server'; I had downloaded X and had a working screen. I can do a plain 'startx', then run 'mythtv-setup', but I think the mythtv user needs to do that and setup should connect to X. The backend (only a backend) starts fine, and sql starts and was configured, so that was a big problem out of the way. I had one question about mysql though; a guide I ran across stated that mysql needs to use Latin1 instead of UTF8; is this accurate ?
'Sorry for all the questions, I'm just hoping someone else has had a successful install of MythTV on Gentoo and might lend a hand.
Any suggestions or info appreciated.
Thanks.

mal1ch1, this is a forum for the Linux distribution KnoppMyth, not for MythTV itself. Checking out http://www.mythtv.org may yield better/quicker results pertaining to Gentoo and a stand alone installation of MythTV.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Setup_MythTV
and
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Li ... ros#Gentoo
...may also help.