The End of One Road

Just as a side note, I did figure out the garbled text screen problem, more or less. When I ran xorgconfig to generate my own xorg.config file, the garbled consoles didn't happen. I started changing the generated xorg.config file by inserting settings from the iMedia's installed xorg.config file. I think it was the Option "VBEModes" "true" line that caused the problem, but I didn't spend much time switching back and forth to tell.

I was starting to get fairly frustrated with the iMedia distro by this point. Although it was pretty well configured for my hardware, there were some peculiarities I couldn't figure out. Although it detected both tuners on the PVR-500, it wouldn't activate the Picture-in-Picture function. Kind of a minor annoyance, since our TV has PIP on its own, but it concerned me that something else might be afoot. (Although I did test the recording-while-watching scenario, and as it was recording with one tuner, it did launch the other tuner for TV watching without a hiccup.) Plus, I wanted some of the MythTV plugins, like the web server, and the web stream player. This mini-distro wasn't built for extensibility -- it lacked a compiler, and it didn't support deb or rpm packages (as far as I could figure out). iMedia did have a full Linux distribution available, but at a cost.

Sad to say, I decided to abandon the iMedia MythTV platform. I made a backup of the hard drive (which I had to do by simply tarring it and having the box FTP to my Windows workstation -- one of the times I'm glad for all the insecure servers installed on your run-of-the-mill Windows box), and called it quits.

The Web Links page of MythTV.org lists three distributions for MythTV: KnoppMyth, based on Knoppix (which I've used); MiniMyth, which appears to be Frontend only but made for VIA motherboards (the link appears to be dead), and MythTV-XBOX, made for Xbox hardware (which I might use on my Xbox someday, as a frontend to this box [since the Xbox has no A/V inputs for recording], but not today). KnoppMyth seems like a likely candidate.