The BFC Computing Weblog

I've got Jolicloud on the wife's netbook, and it's a nice easy-to-use distro.

Trouble is, it's based on Jaunty, which has old mythtv packages. These won't connect to our MythTV 0.23 backend in the TV room.

There is hope, though, the Avendard repo has newer packages compiled for Jaunty, but they're a bit tricky to install.

The process roughly:

Create a file:

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/avenard.list
          

with the lines:

deb http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos jaunty release
          deb http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos jaunty testing
          

and run the commands:

wget http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos/ubuntu-repos.key && sudo apt-key add ubuntu-repos.key && rm ubuntu-repos.key
          apt-get update
          

to pull in the new repo. Now, remember this is dpkg/apt, so we can't just go installing mythtv first as the dependency resolution needs a bit of help.

First do:

sudo apt-get update
          sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-185 nvidia-185-libvdpau nvidia-185-kernel-source
          sudo apt-get install libvdpau1
          

Now do:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade mythtv-frontend mythvideo
          

and whichever other modules you need.

Then run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure mythtv-common
          

to set your backend password.

Finally, install nfs and autofs to be able to mount your storage directory:

sudo apt-get install autofs nfs-common
          

and then edit:

/etc/auto.master
          

uncomment the /net entry, save, and run:

/etc/init.d/autofs restart
          

Then symlink to however you have your backend storage configured, e.g.:

ln -s /net/192.168.1.10/storage/ /storage
          

Now, launch mythfrontend from the Jolicloud Sound & Video group, where it will ask you for sudo access to add your user to the mythtv group and logout. Do it.

Log back in again, launch MythTV again, and go into 'Setup' and configure the storage directories for your media and/or recordings. Set parental controls as needed, they're front-end specific. Change the theme if needed, and set your painter to OpenGL if appropriate.

Those being done, you should be good to go to exit and start MythFrontend from the menu and just use it normally. SD MPEG-2 DVD video streams over 802.11g seems to work fine here in an ASUS 1000HE netbook. And now you have the world's most complex second(third,fourth) television.

Update: Jolicloud support writes via Twitter: "Adding third-party repositories could compromise your configuration. We won't be able to provide you support. ^CD" I suspect if you're reading this you can handle your own support, but be forewarned if you count on Jolicloud support. Personally, I'd rather see them engaging and supporting their community, but I understand about resource constraints.