[mythtvnz] Upgrade/Reinstall tips

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 23 Sep 2013 20:29:19 +1200, you wrote:

>
>Hi All,
>
>I'm gearing up to do a full reinstall of my Mythbox since my nearly two
>year old arch system is feeling increasingly fragile (I haven't touched
>it in months because every time I do pacman breaks something).
>
>The plan is to go completely the other way and install debian
>stable + backports + debian-multmedia. That should hopefully make it
>stable and maintainable for the forsessable future. I've also invested
>in a RAM upgrade and an SSD and after some of the issues I've had with
>HDD write speed (documented on this list), I'm going to ditch LVM+EXT4
>and go with XFS on my RAID 1 array.
>
>As far as I can tell the backup/restore process looks fairly simple for
>myth, just backup/restore the database and recordings.
>
>I was wondering if there are any gotchas I should look out for? Or any
>tips that anyone can pass on to speed up the process?
>
>I'm also hoping to try out XBMC as an alternative to mythfrontend, since
>I see it now has mythtv integration and also integrates with MPD. 
>Can anyone comment on how well the PVR functionality works?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Cheers,
>
>Rob

I have done clean installs of Mythbuntu several times now, and the
procedure you are proposing is just how it works.  I do not have to
backup my recordings, as they are on separate drives so I just mount
them on the new system.  Make sure you use the official backup and
restore procedure for the MythTV database:

  http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Database_Backup_and_Restore

It is hard to get the right options if you try to do it yourself.

Important: Before you create the backup of your database that you are
going to restore to the new system, run a full check (and if
necessary, repair) on the MySQL mythconverg database.  Backing up and
restoring does not always work properly if any tables need repair.  I
think you use mysqlcheck for that - in Mythbuntu you just select an
option in the Mythbuntu Control Center and it sets up a daily cron job
that does it automatically for you, so I do not need to do it
manually.

One thing I find that is invaluable is full access to all the
customisations I have done on my old system - I normally have the old
boot partition online so I can copy across all the bits and pieces I
need to the new system.  There are endless little scripts I have
written and so on.  You also need to preserve the config files in the
home directory of your frontend user, in case they have been
customised at all (eg setup for lirc for your remote, and for the
tv_grab_nz-py script).  And there are likely to be a fair few things
in /etc that you will need access to.  For example, one of the first
things I do to any new Linux install is to add the config that makes
matching of partial command lines in the history file work with the up
and down arrow keys.  I never want to be without that.  So I need to
be able to copy these commands:

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward

from the end of /etc/inputrc to the new system.