Folks
I have tried to get MythTV to run under Knoppmyth, Ubuntu and Fedora. The most confusing of these is Knoppmyth for a wide variety of reasons including (a) It is never clear from the wiki and from the fora which particular tweak works for which version. To date the installation does not include Firefox and the forum has pointers to the fact that apt-get and the like are not reliable. You can't tell what of the SW that is being removed and installed is going to mess up Knoppmyth. I have tried to import DVDs and the batch processing simply does not work. It processes one or more of the batch and leaves only one of the files in the video directory and wont release the DVD to eject it - it simply says it is waiting for the DVD. . What is particularly difficult to understand is the actual boot sequence, the scripts which run and when they run (mythfilldtatabas, Mythtv-setup etc etc), At every step the instructions (wherever you find them) are not definitive and the user is never really clear as to which version of knoppmyth they refer to. under Ubuntu one gets one knickers into a twist because of the ivtv installation. Under Fedora the processes that need to be activated vs those which could be useful are not clear.

Under Knoppmyth getting the DVD import to work, getting the output to the display and understanding what is going on with the system (what is being routed to what location) is unclear. Why does it take so long to download data from Zap2it.com? What is the system doing when it is scaling the backgrounds. Where can you cleanly stop or reboot the system? At every step, for someone who does no know Linux there is something which is a barrier to making this sysem work. I realize that this is a project which is supported by volunteers, but really, if the intent is to enable the average reasonably capable person to make this run - there is no clear concise and tried and true way of making it work. Even with the latest 5D1 version it seems there are problems - but what these problems and their limitation are is not exactly dislosed. I have been working on this since about June of this year and have been singularly incapable of making this sofware run reliably. There's always some reason that something does not work. You always have to know some bloody pre-requisite to make it work.


So if this is going to become a project of some worth then please, provide an install process and the issues with each version. Explain what works and what does not as best you can and help people like myself make it work.

I know many have been able to make this work, but my suspiciion is that they have deeper skills than mine. Yes, I appreciate the work that has been done, but I don't appreciate the fact that nobody tells you that the startup IDE drive should be set to master and the DVD drive to slave on the same IDE channel.

So folks, thanks a lot for trying to make this work for the average user, but frankly I don't think you are really thinking of the average Joe Blow and of the assumptions that you are making with regard to Joe's understanding of what to do about specific situations as they arise.

Yes, I am sure that I will get flames about my inanity or my apparent stupidy and inabilty to explain exactly what is going wrong, but the issue is that if we want to make Knoppmyth reliable

(a) explain clearly which drives need to be connected to which channels
(b) Identify the startup script provide more details about the specific installation options (the one which describes manual installation is particularly weak) and tell the novice where to find errors during boot and execution.
(c) explain what happens during the different parts of the installaion
(d)Provide clear and ineluctable instructions which work.

I know I will get responses which tell me that the information is out there and my response is that maybe it is, bu I have not been able to find ones that completely work.

I could go on -instead I would love to hear from others who believe that they are computer literate and have tried and given up on Knoppmyth installation- simply to gauge the proportion of successes.