HowTo: Build a MythTV box from scratch using Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04
MythTV is a project that brings analogue and digital television to your Ubuntu-powered PC. It primarily functions as your television and personal video recorder (PVR), but can be made to do many other things (refer to the official MythTV site for more information), however one thing that can catch people is actually building a MythTV box from scratch. Over the years, MythTV has been one of the largest causes of baldness in users who have torn out their hair in frustration.
Nowadays, tailored distributions such as Mythbuntu make the task pretty much trivial, but not everyone likes to use the tailor-made distributions. For one, Mythbuntu has a lot of its own branding across it which I personally don’t really like, and I’d prefer not to have it install all of that plus XFCE as the default desktop and then have to undo it all just to get back to a regular Ubuntu desktop.
Since I recently built a MythTV server for my folks, and on top of that connected it to their aging CRT television rather than the latest in visual technology, this makes for a perfect tutorial on how to take a vanilla Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 installation and turn it into a simple, functional MythTV server without all the branding. We are going to just install only the components required to get MythTV up and running. Anything else you add is purely up to you.
HowTo: Fix MythTV’s Frontend not going full-screen in Ubuntu Jaunty.
The next version of Ubuntu is here – 9.04 aka “Jaunty Jackalope”. Along with a wealth of new features comes a wealth of new minor bugs to fix. Not enough to be show-stoppers, but enough to annoy the heck out of you, and here’s a doozy.
If, like most people, you have Compiz enabled and you start the MythTV Frontend, you will notice that rather than go full-screen, Myth will start as a window, essentially, even if your settings within Myth say to go full-screen.
In a single-screen scenario, the MythTV window will start just underneath the upper Gnome panel and the lower Gnome panel will sit over the top of the Myth window, obscuring part of the display. Proof that it’s a window can be found by holding down the ALT key and then dragging the MythTV display around with your mouse.
If you’re like me and use two displays with Myth being run on the second screen, you will see a gap at the top of the screen that is the same height as the upper Gnome panel and you will see your wallpaper showing through there, as shown in the illustration below.
Click for full size (520K)
Here’s how to fix this problem.
EDIT June 2010: This problem still plagues Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04, and this fix will work for those releases as well.
