mysql on Slackware

25, Jul, 2009

I am far from any sort of mysql expert. I know just barely enough to make myself dangerous. Take heed on what your about to read, and double check everything!

To setup mysql on Slackware, read /etc/rc.d/rc.mysql. Tells you everything you need to know.

Install the initial database for mysql as root

mysql_install_db --user=mysql

Then start mysql

rc.mysqld start

Create a password where {password} is the password you want to create.

mysqladmin -uroot password {password}

Login to mysql and create the MythTV database. I’ve followed MythTV’s instructions before, and copied their sample database over. The following works just as well.
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MythTV is truly Mythical

20, Jul, 2009

It’s been a long and cumbersome road, but our MythTV backend is now fully functional. This was no real fault to MythTV. As with anything new, there’s always a learning curve. One thing MythTV is not shy about it is the shear number of configuration possibilities. If I had to fault MythTV on one thing, it’s on a not so impressive configuration GUI. Give me a TEXT (not XML) file to edit, and I’m happy.

The amount of time it took, is purely my fault. With so many options and configurations, I just had to try most of them out. RAID or no RAID, LVM? What pretty much made that choice for me was MythTV’s use of Storage Groups. Thinking ahead in the short term about how many frontends I would possibly connect, and a little math, told me I really did not need the speed benefit of RAID. Standard ATA/100 drives would more than accomplish recording one stream and feeding to 2 clients at the same time with ease. Storage Groups negate the need for LVM. Running out of space? Plug in a disk, and add it to the Storage Group.
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Easy LVM + Raid

15, Jul, 2009

Needed to put my LVM + Raid notes somewhere, why not here?

We’ll start with 5 Hard drives.
<span style=”font-family: monospace”>/dev/sda$ partitioned, formated, and mounted on /</span><p></p>
Partition the rest as linux raid auto detect
<span style=”font-family: monospace”>/dev/sdb$
/dev/sdc$
/dev/sdd$
/dev/sde$</span><p></p>
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MythTV … my beginning

9, Jun, 2009

I’ve always wanted a MythTV setup. The feature list and capabilities are a geek’s dream, and couch potato’s necessity. Looks like I could kill two birds with one stone here. Myself the geek, and The Boss (my girlfriend) being the re-run queen.

It’s not that I’ve never played with MythTV, we just never had a worthwhile tuner. We have a Pinnacle DC30 Pro, and an old Truevision Bravado 1000. These are hardware mjpeg capture cards. Great for capturing home movies, and VHS, not really ideal for continuous TV capture. In the box of spares we also have some non Linux supported hardware mpeg cards (DVexplore chipset). Over the years I’ve used various BT8×8 TV tuners, but could never get the results I wanted out of them.
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Slackware64 Official

20, May, 2009

They’ve done it!

[tap tap tap]… Is this thing on? ;-)

Ready or not, Slackware has now gone 64-bit with an official x86_64 port being maintained in-sync with the regular x86 -current branch. DVDs will be available for purchase from the Slackware store when Slackware 13.0 is released. Many thanks go out to the Slackware team for their help with this branch and a special thank you to Eric Hameleers who did the real heavy lifting re-compiling everything for this architecture, testing, re-testing, and staying in-sync with -current.

We’ve been developing and testing Slackware64 for quite a while. Most of the team is already using Slackware64 on their personal machines, and things are working well enough that it is time to let the community check our work.

We’d like to thank the unofficial 64 bit projects for taking up the slack for us for so long so that we could take our time getting everything just right. Without those alternatives, we would have been pressured to get things out before they were really ready.

As always — have fun!

Pat and the Slackware crew

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