[ATrpms-users] Mythfrontend worked once, twice, but never again...

[C Griffin]

Hey, guys, thanks for the great mailing list. Here goes:

System Specs:

Pentium 4 2.4Ghz CPU (800Mhz FSB)
1GB Corsair TwinX DDR-400 Memory
Abit IC7 Motherboard (onboard AC97 Intel 8x0 audio)
Hauppauge PVR-250 (with newest style black and gray remote)
NVidia GeForce MX 4000 (128MB DDR, using 7174 drivers)
Fedora Core 3 (kernel version: 2.6.10-1.770_14.rhfc3.atsmp)
MythTV 0.17 (fresh install yesterday of all packages and OS from CDs)
Used apt-get for all packages (except the kernel which I used yum for)
/var/video/recordings (reiserfs) for the recordings, and
/var/video/buffer (reiserfs) for the live buffer
/var/video is ~120GB partition

Followed Jarod's guide (several times, ha ha!) and used Axel's RPMS, and 
finally got mythfrontend started up okay. Watched 5 minutes of the Chapelle 
Show, and backed out to main menu when the system locked up and remote 
stopped working. I did forget to run Setup on the frontend. I got 
mythfrontend to run one more time, where I tried to run setup, but it locked 
up again (in a different place on the menu). Mythfrontend will no longer 
make it past the theme caching progress bars. Here are things that I've 
tried to get it running again:

1. Deleted mythconverg database
2. Deleted themecache, Mythphone, and channels directories/files from 
~/.mythtv
3. Ran mythtvsetup again, and reset all options back to the same settings 
(ones that worked before)
4. Rebuilt the mythconverg database
5. Started up the backend, ran mythfilldatabase
6. Everything went smoothly, so I fired up the frontend
7. Messages came up about scaling the images, went through 2 progress bars
8. Froze up again on a blank GANT backdrop

Here are some tests that I tried to check various drivers, etc:

NOTE: I turned off arts through the GUI for the mythtv account (the one I'm 
using for everything)

1. Used "mplayer -vo xv /dev/video0" to watch video with audio. Checks out 
okay, except it complains that my system might be too slow (still scratching 
my head on that one)

2. Tried "dmesg |grep DMA" to verify drives were setup with DMA, both DVD-R 
and HDD were set to UDMA(33) and UDMA(100) respectively. Curiously, I 
received this output:

ivtv: Create DMA stream 0 using 256 16384 byte buffers  4194304 kbytes total
ivtv: Create DMA stream 1
ivtv: Create DMA stream 3 using 455 4608 byte buffers  2097152 kbytes total
Trying to free free DMA3

That looked a little peculiar to me, as DMA1 seems potentially out of place 
and not in use.

3. Tried using the logging feature of mythbackend to see if any errors or 
core dumping occurred. Neither of which were present. The system is hanging 
before any relevant output is logged.

4. Checked permissions on /var/video and its subdirs, all check out okay 
(unsecure rwx for everyone)


ONE LAST NOTE: After the system gets into its hanging-habit, if I try to run 
mythtvsetup (without erasing the old database), I only make it through the 
first 2 questions (Erase card data, and Erase channel data), after which 
setup hangs. All lockups are hard console lockups, killing X doesn't work, 
although I can login with ssh from another machine in the house, but nothing 
restores control back to the console of the main machine.

Ideas? Vague directions to point me in? Ancient curses to punish the system?

Thanks a ton everyone!
Chris Griffin
chewtoy11 at hotmail.com
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