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I tried doing

   chmod u+s /usr/bin/mythbackend /usr/bin/mythfrontend

to see if it would make the display of the show actually work properly. No dice. I wonder now if there’s an issue with the X display properly using the Hauppauge card? I worder if there are hardware options available on the card that my XF86Config should use to make things go more quickly.

Actually, I suspect the first thing I should do is check out the latest ivtv driver. Build it, make it reboot to load it (I’ve not been able to make the module unload, try as I might). One helpful comment from someone suggested that I shouldn’t be forced to do quite the level of custom settings in /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv as I have been. The newer driver reportedly does a lot of the work for you, so you don’t have to specify which card, PAL vs NTSC (I’m suspect of the chances of this), etc.

Just a matter of time. I’ve got to get this working in the next couple of weeks, or I know the holidays will make me not touch it again until January. That would just be ridiculous.

I tried to upgrade my desktop system from SuSE 9.1 to SuSE 9.2, but it failed. I have a few drives on it:

hda / and /home
hdb /work
hdc /music
hdd CD-ROM/DVD-RW
hde /backup and /tv

(I know I need to put /home on its own disk, just not easy at the moment—either a 40Gb as it is now, or a 250Gb. Too much space for /home not isolated on its own disk.)

I was able to boot off the CD, pick the language English(US), and then select “Update an existing system.” (Why on the initial boot menu don’t they say “Installation / Upgrade”? I had to go through to see if it supported upgrading instead of just a raw install.)

It got to the point of trying to figure out my system and then complained, “Failed to mount target system.” It pointed me at /var/log/YaST2/y2log for the details. Tsk tsk, the GUI should let me see it there. I looked in the log, and saw that it failed trying to mount /dev/hdd1 as /backup. Hmm.

It looks like it saw the hde drive just fine (meaning the kernel has the driver for the Promise UDMA133 card that I use to let me have more than 4 devices), looking at the Alt-F3 screen where it initially lists the drives. But something in the scripts used to install messed up the idea of where the drives are. The original /etc/fstab is clear about mounting /dev/hde1 on /backup and /dev/hde2 on /tv. I’m not yet sure why it thought it was hdd (the CD doing the install). I didn’t expect a mistake like this.

The short-term fix will be to just comment out the /backup and /tv entries in /etc/fstab so that the install process won’t think that those partitions need to be mounted. Maybe tomorrow or next week, time to go to bed.

Sven and I were comparing notes on how people describe the way dog barks in the English and Chinese language. Off the top of my head, I only know of one Chinese bark - “wo, wo”. In English there are many - “bark”, “ruff”, “arf”. We couldn’t figure out what’s up with “bow wow”.