It's that time again. Time to upgrade all the servers in the house (and at work, probably early next month) to the latest fedora release. I started with my mythtv server since it only serves two purposes: run as the MythTV backend and run BOINC.

I jumped into this a little fast, unfortunately. I trashed my MythTV database. Dooh! But installing Fedora 7 was a nobrainer. I downloaded the dvd and the boot.iso image, burned the boot.iso image and booted the server with it. Then I exported the directory where the DVD iso image was on another machine on the local network at home and told the f7 install to NFS mount it. Worked like a charm. I had absolutely no hickups bringing the server backup (sans MythTV).

Then I had to get MythTV installed. I added ATrpms to my yum repods lits and installed mythtv-suite. Then I installed the IVTV package (ivtv and ivtv-firmware) for my Hauppage WinTV-150 card. A reboot was required to get the driver to find the firmware in the hotplug directories. That all came up pretty easy.

Next was reinstalling MythTV. The hardest parts here were getting MySQL to accept remote connections. For some reason it just wouldn't work if I specified a network IP wildcard for the domain portion of the user id. I must have been doing something wrong. I eventually just punted to a very permissive connection policy since the server is behind my firewall at home anyway. And I need network access to the server since I have frontends scattered around the house.

The next hard part was getting Schedules Direct information into the server. I've signed up but haven't paid yet (I will tomorrow – I'm on the free 7 day trial at the moment). I didn't enabled my lineup there before configuring the backend with mythtv-setup. So I had to go back and enable it later. This turned into a catch-22 problem where I wasn't able to get the channel names. Turns out I had to delete all my video sources and capture cards and then go back in and add them again *after* I'd set my lineup on SD. I also had to run "Fetch Channel Lineup from listing source" twice for some reason. Not sure why. But the second time actually picked up the channel listings. Earlier, I had problems with my capture card because I'd mistakenly chosen "Analog V4l" instead of "MPEG-2" for my Hauppage 150 card.

The next thing I need to do is get my video collection back into the database. There is a perl script, called imdb-bulk-update, that is a wrapper around the imdb.pl script that comes with MythTV that is supposed to handled bulk updates of this. It appears to do a modest job identifying about 1/3 of my movies. The rest I'll have to hand configure using the IMDB interface. This isn't hard, just time consuming.

So far, so good. The mythtv backend server is back up. I won't be able to test audio until I upgrade my frontends, which probably won't happen this week. I'll upgrade the rest of the servers first. I'm too busy at work to take a chance of having, for example, my laptop go down during the upgrade and I can't login to work at night. But that will all clear up in the next couple of weeks.

Upgrading isn't all that hard anymore, but it's tough to schedule it all just right so I'm not down for too long if things go bad.

Most of my servers are upgraded now (except one that is having hardware problems). My laptop upgrade is going well too. I have a little script that backs up important config files for me before hand. Then I just install the new OS over the old one (my login and web directories are kept on a separate, unmodified partition, which makes this process quite painless). But then I have to deal with getting all my apps running again, using the newest versions of each.

The first problem was xine. Xine's support for playing DVD movies is not available by default. So you need to go through a special process. A post to FedoraNews explains how to do this using the livna repositories. Unfortunately, Livna and Fedora base don't mix well because Fedora base provides a version of faad2 for ffmpeg (required by Xine) that is incompatible with the version of ffmpeg that Livna provides. The way around this is to use the FreshRPMS archive instead. I just installed the yum repo entry and then used the same processes as the FedoraNews post suggested, but used the FreshRPMS repository instead. That worked perfectly.

The next problem is getting my i915GM (intel mobile graphics) chipset to support dual head with VGA and tv-out. This worked fine with the xorg i915 driver in FC5. But in F7, they've switched to the "intel" driver and the i915 is no longer included. The "intel" driver doesn't work in dual head configuration – it just locks up all video using either my old configuration or the gnome dual head GUI configuration utility. I found the Linux Graphics Drivers from Intel web site, but their suggestion of using xrandr to configure dual head hasn't seemed to work either. So I'm still digging into this problem.

The other problem that is still open is that the MythTV frontend can't connect to the backend. I installed the mythtv-frontend package from ATrpms but it looks like it's missing the qt-MySQL package, which I can tell by looking at the output from mythtvfrontend (which says there are not database plugins) and the fact that qt-MySQL is installed on the backend from when I installed the mythtv-suite metapackage. So, I did

sudo yum install qt-MySQL

and tried the frontend again. It works, but boy is there a lot of frame drop. I may need to tweak the config on the front end using the setup menu option.

Update 2007-09-30
It looks like switching from the "intel" X driver, which is apparently experimental, back to the i810 driver allows MythTV to work without dropping frames on the client.  So that much is working again.

But the i810 driver appears broken with respect to VGA out (I haven't tried TV out yet).  The configs I used previously don't work with the new driver, and I'm not doing much beside setting the BusID for each device entry and setting MonitorLayout "CRT,LFP" for both devices.  This should work as far as I know.  But it doesn't.  So I'm going to have to dig into this further, maybe building the latest driver builds myself.

Update 2007-10-02
I managed to get the "intel" driver to work with both LVDS (re: laptop LCD) and the VGA outputs, but I wasn't able to get it to work the way it did with the old i810 driver under FC5 where my laptop was Screen 0 and the VGA was Screen 1 and Xinerama allowed the LCD to be the primary and the VGA the secondary (so my desktop toolbars stayed on my laptop and didn't display on the VGA screen).  Not only that, but the only way I could get both displays to work with their independent resolutions (which worked previously w/FC5 and the i810 driver) was when the laptop LCD became the secondary and the VGA primary using xrandr to set it up.  And I still haven't found a way to get the intel driver to work with MythTV anyway.

The i810 driver simply doesn't work with dual head support anymore.  It crashes (segv's) repeatedly and eventually leaves the video in such a state as to force a reboot just to get X working on the LCD by itself. 

This is a sorry state of affairs.  I was mildy upset that the i810 driver would die every so often (but seldom) during dual head use and forced a reboot.  But at least it worked most of the time.  And TV out never died on me.  Now I can't get any of it to work.  ARgggh.  I'm going ot file bug reports over on Freedesktop.org's bugzilla db but at the moment I'm waiting for my login confirmation to be mailed to me.

Side note:  I'm not certain of this, but it seems to me that F7 is quite a bit more sluggish than FC5.  I use the Workspace switcher extensively (instead of iconizing/minimizing my windows) and switching desktops is much slower now with more swapping.  Not sure why this is.  But I'm hoping there is something I can tweak to make it better.  Between the slowdown and video support going belly up, I'm not real happy with my upgrade.  *sigh*