Step 1: Install Mythtv

Either install it through your distributions package manager, or (preferably) install it from source.

I can't go into the details on how to install MythTV from precompiled distribution packages, as there are so many distributions, and the prefered method is by source anyway.

From Source

To compile and install MythTV from source, first create a mythtv user, named, usually, "mythtv". Become that user (either login to that user account, or use su - mythtv. Go to the location of the mythtv tarball (it is assumed for this example, that you are installing MythTV version 0.18.1. If you are using a different version, you will obviously need to change the name of the tarball below.

At this point the configure script will run, if the script fails it should outline what dependancy it needs that you do not have. You should obviously then set out to install that dependancy, either via package management if your distribution has that program/library, or from source.

Once the configure script has run, you will be able to start compiling the source, as follows:

It does take some time to compile MythTV, go away, have dinner, or if you have a really fast machine, coffee.

Once the compile has finished, you will need to install the compiled result. Normally you will need to become root at this stage, either using su as below, or your favourite root-becoming-program (eg sudo).

MythTV utilizes a MySQL backend, and you will need to configure MySQL for MythTV before you can continue. It is assumed here that your root user account has full access to MySQL, if not, replace root with whatever user has the ability to create users and databases in MySQL.

Assuming that completes without problems, onwards to the next step.

Contact me: zaf@nrc.co.nz with any updates or suggestions, or maybe questions if they are intelligent ones.