Further Adventures with MythTV

I've documented various travails getting MythTV (specifically, via the Mythbuntu Linux distribution) to behave as expected and play well with my hardware. (If you want to see them, you can click the MythTV link in the tag cloud on the lower right, or use the search box.) Unfortunately, I've been stuck on an old version, unable to upgrade safely, for a while. The problem was likely the BIOS. Assorted kernel updates made waking up to record shows dicey at best, so I froze the machine on a now rather dated kernel ... when meant sticking to a rather dated version of Mythbuntu as well.

I finally got around to buying a new PC (HP Pavilion) to be my PVR. In the meantime, development of Mythbuntu has apparently ceased, so I decided to install Linux Mint (the same operating system I have on my desktop and laptop) and then install MythTV on top of that. What I thought would be an afternoon's work stretched out over four days or so, due to a combination of BIOS adventures (starting with disabling "SecureBoot" and convincing the BIOS to let me boot from the DVD drive ... which I somehow had to do twice) and my natural ineptitude. I mistakenly thought that having a working MythTV installation on the old machine, from which I could copy various settings and scripts, would make installation smooth sailing. Going into the process, my expectation was that moving the backend database from the old machine to the new one would be the sticking point. It turned out that was the one step that went (fairly) smoothly.

In this post, I'll document a couple of issues and how I sorted them out.

First issue: No sound

Watching TV is considerably less fun when you have no sound. Both the old machine and the new one were/are connected to my TV via an HDMI cable, and after a bit of fuss sound worked on the old machine. I have no idea why the new machine put up  more of a fight, but I suspect it has something to do with using Mythbuntu versus Mint and which sound components each installs by default.

At any event, I found a couple of blog posts that, between them, got me over the hump:

• Fix No Sound (Dummy Output) Issue In Ubuntu With SND HDA Intel

• No sound on Mythbuntu/optiplex frontend SOLVED

I have an old post of my own relating to the same problem (HDMI Audio in Mythbuntu), but the symptoms on the Mythbuntu box were a bit different, so I'm not sure how helpful it would be on Mint (or any other distribution).

Second issue: Being bugged for a password

I swear that this never happened on Mythbuntu, so it surprised me when it happened on Mint. On both machines, I use the MythWelcome program as the gateway to the front end, and the Mythshutdown application to set wake-up times for scheduled recordings and shut the machine down (either automatically when idle for a specified time, or manually by clicking the shut down button in MythWelcome). On the new machine, shutting down from the MythWelcome menu resulted in a prompt for the root password. Back end use of mythwelcome did not produce a visible password request, but also did not work as expected. I suspect it might have been trying to ask for a root password in a non-graphical context (nowhere to display the password prompt). On the old machine, it just worked with no intervention on my part.

It turns out I was missing a file. The MythTV installation process on both machines created a "mythtv" user group and added my account to it. What was missing was an addition to the sudoers file -- or, more precisely, a file parked in the /etc/sudoers.d directory, which is automatically appended to the sudoers file at startup. The file needs to be installed as root. Apparently Mythbuntu did that automatically, whereas the MythTV installer did not (and did not prompt me to do so).

The file's name is just "mythtv" (which I don't think is significant -- any file name should work). It is a plain text file, containing the following single line:

%mythtv ALL = NOPASSWD: /sbin/shutdown, /bin/sh, /usr/bin/setwakeup.sh, /usr/bin/mythshutdown, /sbin/poweroff, /sbin/reboot

The first bit ("%mythtv" -- don't forget the percent sign) says that what follows applies to anyone in the "mythtv" user group. The rest identifies six programs that get to run as root without requiring a password to be entered. Note that it includes the "setwakeup" script (which sets the wake-up time for a specified interval ahead of the next scheduled recording) and various commands relating to shutting down or rebooting the system. I'm a bit surprised to see /bin/sh in there, which apparently lets the mythtv group run any shell script that requires elevated privileges. That said, I'm not going to screw with it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!