All I wanted to do was listen to some music.
Specifically, I wanted to check out the ‘amarok’ player and its syncing abilities. I didn’t have it installed already, and I started looking through the list of prerequisites necessary to build it, and then I noticed that it was included in the Slackware 11.0 release. I was still running 10.2, mostly due to laziness, and figured that it was as good a time as any to upgrade.
The upgrade itself went smoothly, having done it many times before. But, with a new release comes a new kernel version, and a new kernel version means new driver builds, and that’s where the problems began. Specifically, there are three drivers I have to build myself since they’re not part of the standard install: ivtv and lirc, for MythTV, and the NVIDIA video driver.
I figured that since I had to rebuild the drivers anyway, I may as well make sure I’ve got the best versions available. I checked the MythTV wiki for the recommended version of the NVIDIA driver (MythTV is particularly sensitive to it because of its XvMC usage), downloaded it, and installed it. Unfortunately, while it works perfectly fine on my main monitor, the TV-Out line no longer works, and that’s somewhat crucial to the whole MythTV thing. I thought it might have just been a difference in configuration, but hours of fiddling and searching haven’t helped any. Reverting back to the previous version of the driver I was using doesn’t seem to be an option either, as that version fails to build with this kernel.
The version of lirc I was using also failed to build under the new kernel, so I had to chase down a new version of it. Only a release candidate was available, but it’s better than nothing, and seems to be working at least.
I wouldn’t be so lucky with ivtv, though. I had to upgrade it since specific versions of ivtv are tightly tied to specific versions of the kernel. It built without problems, but MythTV fails to record anything with it, producing errors about failing to tune in the right frequency. Using it directly from the command-line tools, it can tune channels and record MPEG clips, but with only audio and no video. Why? Who knows…
And normally in cases like this I’d just go back to using the previous version of the kernel, except that upgrading Slackware also upgraded the ‘udev’ package, the new version requires the new kernel, and you can’t just roll back the entire upgrade. Sigh.
So, basically, right now my MythTV box can neither record nor play back any recordings, making it somewhat useless. And all just because I wanted to use ‘amarok’. Of course, I’ve partly brought this upon myself by sticking with the deliberately-painful Slackware distro, but at this time it would be even more effort to completely rebuild the system with something else. Maybe I’ll have to though, if I run out of clever ideas…
(Right now I’m building a version of the kernel that’s somewhere in between the old and new versions. With luck, it’ll be new enough to satisfy ‘udev’ while still being old enough to work with the old drivers. I hope. Update: Kernel 2.6.15.7 successfully hits that magic spot, and all is well again.)