Hi, I will be getting a sata 250 gig seagate drive tomorrow and have a 160 gig ide drive. I plan on using fedora 5 and want to ask what type of partition would be good for the setup. I read that xfs is good for large video files? I'm not sure how much to set aside, so any suggestions would be good. I want to use the 160 gig for downloads only?

MythTV recordings can take up a lot of space. I would recommend planning ahead, by setting up LVM to use with the recordings ( http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO ). That way you can easily enlarge the partition later if you find you need more room (even spanning over to a new disk or two).

I use XFS for my recordings. No problems with it. I chose it after dong research as you are now. I have not done personal comparisons of XFS vs. other filesystem types, so my XFS choice was based on the work/testing of others. XFS partitions can easily be enlarged, but not shrunk. Check out the LVM HowTo mentioned above. Somewhere in that document it talks about which filesystem types cannot be shrunk. I think the non-shrinkables were XFS and JFS, but don't quote me on that. Chances are you won't want to shrink partition, but if you think you might, chose a filesystem type that supports this.

p.s. - with default MythTV recording settings, a one hour show takes right at 2.5 Gb of diskspace using my PVR-150 capture card with hardware encoding.

@haertig, thanks do you or anyone also know a detail guide on installing mythtv as it is not an easy process?

The one on the MythTV website is what I used. I built everything from source and didn't use any pre-made packages. It wasn't trivial, but it wasn't terribly difficult either. If you have no experience with Linux and/or do not have a programmer mentality, you might be better off going with packages made for your distro if they're available, of simply install KnoppMyth instead. Compiling things from scratch you'll surely run into make errors at some point, probably lots of them, and will need to know (or find out) how to interpret what they mean and how to fix them. KnoppMyth pretty much lets you avoid all of that (compiling stuff). There's still some setup you need to do with KnoppMyth, and when I used it there were a few minor errors I had to deal with, but all in all it's the easiest way to get MythTV going.

I know this is an old post, but I just got interested in the whole PVR thing and have been doing some research tonight.
This page is specifically for Fedora Core 5, but it answers many of the questions you're asking (if you haven't found it already).

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

Exo