What Next
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Backups
A normal part of mythtv maintenance is damage recovery. If god forbid your box is to go down, its best to be ready to recover quickly. This can range from having to do regular backups of the operating system, to instead regularly backing up the mysql database. Since you set up the machine with a seperate partition for recordings, an operating system backup should be fairly small and manageable. I'd recommend you investigate sbackup for this purpose.
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Upgrades
It will be your responsibility to regularly run
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
to be sure that you grab the latest updates.
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Samba File Sharing
A very useful thing for a mixed windows/linux/mac network is setting up Samba on your MythTV machine. A couply of ideas you can use samba for:
- Sharing your recordings via a centralized network share that is accessed through links for mythweb.
- Copying pictures/dvds/videos back and forth among the machines from on the windows/mac machines
- Mounting a windows/mac network share on your backend to access content stored on the windows or mac
See the Ubuntu guide for more information about setting up samba: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy#Samba_Server
phpmyadmin
phpmyadmin is a very useful tool for administering a mysql server. If you ever run into something that you need to directly modify in the mysql tables, but don't want to go through the trouble of learning mysql commands by hand, phpmyadmin will help. It has a web interface that will allow manipulation of tables, backup, privilege admustment and almost everything done by CLI.
Once you install phpmyadmin, I would recommend you secure your root password for it from within the interface.
To install it,
sudo apt-get install apache2 sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
If you haven't installed mythweb prior to phpmyadmin, you will also need to do install a php support library for apache. Mythweb depends on php4, by default. Either php4 or 5 may be used, however. To install the php5 library:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
phpmyadmin will then be accessible by going to
Adding Channel Icons
Credit to plb from the forums. The original post is here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=331913
1) Install xmltv.
sudo apt-get install xmltv
2) Obtain the script for making an iconmap.
wget "http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/browser/branches/release-0-20-fixes/mythtv/contrib/mkiconmap.pl?format=txt" -O mkiconmap.pl
3) Start mythfrontend.
mythfrontend
4) Run the script.
perl mkiconmap.pl
5) Add to your database.
mythfilldatabase --import-icon-map iconmap.xml --update-icon-map
ACPI Shutdown & Wakeup
If your motherboard is capable, it is possible for MythTV to shut itself down when it is idle and wake itself up if there is a recording scheduled. One method is by using the built-in ACPI Shutdown/Wakeup via RTC alarm function of many motherboards. To see if this might be possible with your system and a guide on how you might get this working for you, visit: ACPI Shutdown Wakeup
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Plugins
For a backend only machine, the only applicable plugin is mythweb. Mythweb can be installed by:
sudo apt-get install mythweb
This will properly install apache2, php4, and mythweb. If you would like to use php5 instead, install it prior to installing mythweb.