Well, after 5 days of effort, I finally have a working R5C7 machine. Warning, this a long post.

I heart knoppmyth. It is the easiest system to use, usually.

My setup is very vanilla. A P4 2.8, 512 MB, Nvidia Card, Two PVR-250's, type 50 and type 39. 3 hard drives, HDB and HDD on LVM. Had it for two years. Has about a TB of recordings and two years worth of data in the database. My son started calling it the Thomas Machine and the name has stuck.

My neighbour has a fedora with mythtv, and I finally convinced him to use Knoppmyth. Everything went great. I really loved the new features, and decided to upgrade myself since my guinena pig survived.

Made a backup, which takes about 40 minutes. Upgraded. Looks good. Reboot. Kernal Panic.

OK, me thinks, "I've seen this before. I just make sure I use the same CDROM I burned it with instead of a DVD drive." So I change CD Roms.

Re-upgrade.

Backup won't restore. OK, fine. I'll move it to a different directory and restore it later. Kernal Panic.
Re-upgrade.

Static on TV output. OK, I've seen this before. Do the dance of the two hauppepage cards on ivtv as per the multiple posts on this site. God bless this forum.

However, nothing. So I blow away the card settings again in mythtv-setup and try again. Voila, channel 3 works. Change to channel 14, nothing.

Since I've made changes to ivtv, and mythbackend usuallly hates that, I reboot. Yup, kernal panic.

OK, this is getting stupid. I'm now 48 hours into this so I try something different. I take out the two drives with the LVM and do a full install.

Everything works great. Reboot. It works. Do I dare try to watch TV I ask the voices that have started to appear in my head after 3 days with only 2 hours sleep? Why not they say? Except for Joe, he's getting negative at this point

Kicked out of Frontend. Seg fault. Cecil and Dale are now looking at me as if to say what have you done to our baby from the TV.

OK. Restart Frontend. Try TV again. Works. Wierd, but hey, seg faults happen. All my channels are there.

Hand restore LVM just to be sure. Mount it. Looks good.

Reboot. And, it worked.

Hand edit the 12 MB mythconverg.sql to get rid of all the settings, but keep the credits, keywords, etc. As I get tp "recorded", I realize that I've done this the extremely hard way. cat mythconverg|grep \'<<table i want>>\' > file would have worked a lot faster.

Once the file was finished, I ran mysql -umythtv -pmythtv mythconverg < file.

Discovered that I had not correctly hand edited the file, and the restore choked at about the 50% mark. Fixed my error. Logged in mysql, deleted the tables I wanted to restore. Restore backup.

All the files are there. The database works. Run myth.repairdatabase to check if I missed any lines.

It won't run. Can't connect. Back to forum. Finally find the suggestion to add --dbhost=localhost. Works! Only missed one file, and it had data. Great.

Install x11vnc as per wiki because I travel and like to be able to fix it remotely if things go wrong and the Thomas machine stops working.

Power Outage. OK, whatever, I live in the outer suburbs, these things happen. Power comes back, and you guessed it, KERNAL PANIC.

Reinstall, restore, do nothing. Find the sticky in hints and tips about upgrading that I managed to miss the two hundred other times I searched. to quote



Roach? Man, that's the understatement of the decade. These are New York City Cockroaches man. They could run for office.

Change to stable. Apt-get X11vnc. Reboot. Kernal Panic. MUST FIND HAMMER. WHERE IS HAMMER?

Breathe deeply, reinstall. No problem, I know exactly how long this will take at this point.

Until the next release, I will leave it alone. No more cool tricks from the wiki.

Summary of my advise for folks.

0) Make backups. Burm them to DVD, copy them to another harddrive , email them to yourself, and leave a sealed copy with your lawyer with instruction to be opened upon your death.
1) R5C7 seems to work great once its installed.
2) However its more unstable than a postal employee.
3) Do not under any conditions add anything.
4)In fact do yourself a favour and chmod apt-get to 111 immediately. I forget the source of the quote, but treat it like a cave orge. Avoid it if possible, but you must use it do so with fear and trepidation.
4) Search the forums.
5)Repeat the search. The answer is here somewhere.
6) Don't assume that because it was bug in the past, its the same problem. Cecil and Dave had eliminated every one of the bugs I was trying to avoid. In fact, my attempts to avoid them caused me trouble!
7) If you don't need to to upgrade, my advise at this point is don't. Re-install it and restore your backups.
Thank you to Cecil and Dave for all their hard work. Yes, my system didn't go great, but I have put knoppmyth onto about a dozen systems, and its a great system.

Damian

Sorry you didn't find the R5C7 Upgrade hints ountil so late in the process I've done everything possible to publicize them. I've posted links to them in almost every R5C7 upgrade thread I've seen to make it easier for people to find them. As a matter of fact for future reference: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10116

R5C7 had a huge amount of testing, at one point I even remember tell someone that upgrade testing was especially important. I've upgraded and downgraded to that particular version dozens of times myself, and helped many others do the same. I've also found it to be remarkably stable.

As for apt-get, after switching to the stable repositories, you can generally use it safely if you follow 3 common sense rules: 1) Don't ever use the -y option. 2) Always review the list of packages it wants to add or remove. 3) If in doubt say "no".

BTW - Dale (aka rdt) not Dave

Great read. Don't know how many times I have had a project go bonkers.

What did you upgrade from and why?

For the sake of sanity and peace with my wife, next time I upgrade I am going to have
a working copy of / ready to boot on a different partition. That way I can work through the
problems at my own pace.. or just abandon it, if I decide my reason for the upgrade is not
worth the trouble. An extra 4 gigs for a / backout plan is small price to pay for peace.

Ouch thats a bad weekend. glad you got it all back up and running.

BTW
Have you tried NoMachine instead of vnc?

I didn't relize it was part of the distro until just recently....

Works great and it is already setup just download the client app. Instruction are on the wiki

Sorry Dale.

I can't explain why I didn't see that link. I agree, it's there about 6 ways to sunday. I even checked the proxy cache to see if I was losing it. Nope. Just plain missed it.

No, I haven't tried No Machine. But I'll look into it, on another machine

I upgraded because I wanted some of the great new features. I had 0.19 on machines before, but this build puts some many things together well. It's worth it in the end, but man, what a bear. Now I have to figure what the Netflix option actually does.

Definitely do a search; it doesn't appear to do much until you do a fair amount of configuring. And even then, it's the only component of MythTV that's ever managed to crash my frontend.

Where the frell is the hardware recommendation in this post? I don't mind folks coming to the forum and writing a novel, but do so right frelling area....

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Cesman,

Glad you have time to be disparaging, but I'm still trying to recover from this release. To quote the sub-title of the forum - "If you've installed KnoppMyth and had edit any file to get things working. Please explain what you did to get things working."

Now, explain to me what's wrong with my posting in light of subtitle of the group. I had to edit files to get the nightmare that is R5C7 working, multiple files, and I listed how I did. This is not a Linux issue, this a Knoppmyth issue. I’d not look under General - General discussion about Linux to find advise about upgrading Knoppmyth. Better yet, why not a group about upgrading specifically?

As for the fact that I wrote a long port, in future, I'll just post "It don't work. Help me please" if that make you happy.

I guess should expect this, this matches the advice in the pamphlet that has fouled up some many folks, just Apt-get whatever package you want. And prey that you won't hose your system.

Without a doubt, this is the worst release to date. At very least, the sources file should be configured to not kill people's systems.

If you're willing to blow away your system and start over, fine, this might be a decent release, if you don't want to add anything. But so far, I not seen one system upgrade safely, and I done 4, multiple times, now in order to get my entire house converted, and to help out some friends how ignored my advice to bypass this release entirely.

What's broken in this release? Transcoding, playback, upgrade, apt-get, mythfrontend seg faults constantly.

This was a system that had been up for about a year. My record uptime so far is 3 days. Pardon me for being bitter.

You had a hard time but you were good natured about it. Something akin to "I walked
into a swampy thicket full of mosquitoes and this is what I learned.."

You know in the almost 3 years the forum have been up, only a few people don't understand what:

Hardware recommendations:
Tier 1.
Tier 2.
Tier 3.

Means.... Sorry, my stance on this isn't changing and I'm not changing the text to simplify things. I know KnoppMyth isn't perfect, but when you can work a 40 hour work week (hell, last Thursday and Friday along I worked 27 hrs.)... Let me stop.

I think for most people R5C7 has worked well! Sorry, if it doesn't work for you, you are free to use whatever it is you choose to use.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

My advice is to take the conservative approach when ever you upgrade. TJC is always talking about this issue since the longer people use their system their data becomes important to them. For a long time I resisted migrating from R4v5. I was not comfortable with the thought of losing everything that I recorded to the past 1.5 years.

This is what I decided to do to deal with the risk. I purchased a second larger drive to test out the upgrade. Basically I bought a larger drive to expand my setup to instead of going the LVM route. I also have a copy of Ghost. Using Ghost I copied the drive to the new larger drive and I tested the migration and it would not migrate my database correctly until the release of R5B7. Since then I migrated to R5C7.

My experience with R5B/C7 has been good. I now have HDTV and myth is now able to detect my AIR2pC cards right out of the box. The bug in the editor is now gone. That does not mean that everything it perfect but it is a lot better overall....

Well,

I already read Dwallace experience with r5c7 and I want to share my experience.
Definitely I'm no such Linux/Myth geek like Dwallace but...

My house system has 1 central BE/FE with 0.8TB LVM storage + 2 diskless FE (minimyth based).
Whole system is running in production use since r5c7 introduce WITHOUT single problem.
I started with R5A16, then R5A22 then R5B7 and finally R5C7. All upgrades with preserving 0.8TB content.
Now r5c7 (still with LVM) is central 24x7 host in my house (Inet fw, DHCP srv, WLAN AP, file print srv and media server).

My experience: R5c7 is most stable and bullet proof myth distr. I'm used.
Yours problems are probably are result really deep Linux customization. IMHO this is problem of Linux itself, not myth....

Yeah, Ijust tried to do an upgrade of an earlier version (don't recall exact version...about 6-8 mos old) and it was all wiggy. This is all tier 1 hardware - I built the system the last time I did a re-install of knoppmyth to avoid the hell my hodge-podge machine I used before caused me. previously. That install went flawlessly (and so did the fresh blow-out install of the latest version I wound up doing tonight.)

The more I tried to get it straight using the info in the wiki and on the forums, the more issues that came up.

Since my files weren't all that important to me, I blew it all out and started from scratch.

I would suggest that anyone who is trying to upgrade from a not-so-recent release and isn't ready to invest significant effort and time (I think most users of knoppmyth, by definition, are attempting to avoid just that) would best leave a well running system alone.

Just my 2c

My R5C7 has been working, if not flawlessly, then with only minor nits... on plain vanilla (IBM, Nvidia, PVR350, Air2PC) since its introduction. It's not the code... You probably got your code damaged during the installation & upgrade process.

I've upgraded/downgraded/sidegraded my system more times than I care to tell you about, sometimes 4-5 times in a day. The number of R5C7 *grades I've done now is well into the dozens. I'm so confident in the R5C7 upgrade process that it's not unusual for me to experiment on my production hardware up to an hour before something that I really want to record is scheduled to start, with full confidence that if it's not working or even questionable, I can get back to the tried and true R5C7 in well under 45 minutes.

This does imply a bit of discipline:
- I'm a fanatic about making a good backup before starting an experiment, and every backup gets checked before I go any further.
- I've got very detailed notes that I follow for the upgrade process.
- I've got all of my post install tweeks scripted, with a master script that runs them all:

I've posted the more general scripts like the webmin setup in the past, so I won't repeat them here.

Seriously, a lot of folks, spent a lot of time, testing the snot out of R5C7 and it's predecessors, until the install, upgrade and daily operations were as clean and reliable as we could get them. More of us spent a bunch of time documenting how to install or upgrade as smoothly as possible, and trying to make sure that people saw that information.