Adventures with Fedora Core 3

I'm trying to take an old computer that was sitting in my basement for the past year and turn it into a home entertainment center (hey, the TV card in it from 1998 has to be useful for something). Luckily, according to the MythTV site, 800 MHz is just enough to watch live TV, and this is 926 MHz.

I had previously tested it out with a few Live Distros (Mepis, Kanotix, and even LinspireLive!) and in all of them, the TV card worked with the module 'bttv' (although in Mepis, the sound card wasn't detected for whatever reason).

With the Fedora/MythTV HOWTO being my best chance of getting this thing working, I downloaded and burned all 4 FC3 discs (since the HOWTO is in FC3, and I have heard some bad things about FC4).

Well, my first step (after installing) was to install the atrpms-kickstart package, which included apt and a configuration good to update all the packages in the system and to restore the proper version of apt. The first time I did it, all went well with the upgrade (even the new Kernel), although once I restarted to use the newer kernel, I quickly found that apt was gone (it was supposed to install the normal version, which it didn't) and rpm kept giving me errors. I found a fix on RedHat's Bugzilla, which involved installing a version of SElinux (even though that was disabled). Sure enough, that worked fine, but I still don't have apt.

Rather than mess around with it some more, I did another clean install (except this time, since it has two hard drives, I did an LVM so I have an extra 6 gigs for recorded TV). This time I installed a little more, including OOo. The apt upgrade took twice as long since it had to download/install twice as much. This time, the computer rebooted in the middle of installing, and I still don't know why.

I booted back up into Fedora, and the RPM command returned the error "Segmentation Fault"

I did a third clean install of Fedora, this time with less packages than I did the first time, and the apt upgrade went along much quicker, but once it was done I still didn't have apt and had to apply the rpm fix. This time instead of doing another clean install, I decided to try out yum. I added the atrpm repository (or, as yum refers to it, 'Repo') to the yum.conf file. It seemed to work ok, so I tried to install synaptic. This actually worked and, as a bonus, installed apt in the process. So now I finally have apt, and even synaptic.

However, I quickly noticed dependency problems. I could not install any KDE application, because there was an issue with kdebase and kdeartwork (or whatever the proper name is). kdeartwork was too new for kdebase, so every time I tried installing a K application, it gave me that error.

*sigh* I will probably need to do a fourth clean install of it, except this time, I'm using yum for everything exept for installing MythTV itself (on the website, he says that it is easier to install MythTV using apt)

I wish there was an easy Debian/MythTV HOWTO out there...