Forgive me for the long post: I always wait until I'm overwhelmed before I start asking questions.

I'm trying to set up a PVR under Linux. I installed a TV tuner card and got xawtv working. Now I need to set up a VCR program. I've looked at several different options, including VCR (http://www.stack.nl/~brama/vcr/), Freevo (http://freevo.sourceforge.net/), and MythTV (http://mythtv.org/).

I've decided to go with MythTV, since it looks like VCR is no longer under development and Freevo doesn't currently offer the time-shifting or scheduled recording features of MythTV. My problem is that MythTV requires qt > 3.0. I'm running Red Hat 7.2, which comes with qt 2.x.

I tried upgrading to qt > 3.0, but a lot of KDE stuff is using qt 2.x. (I use Gnome, but I opted to install both desktop managers to get a feel for them.) So, I decided to upgrade to KDE 3.0.

It seemed the easiest way to upgrade to KDE 3.0 was just to upgrade to Red Hat 7.3. I tried to upgrade, but the upgrade failed because I don't have enough space on /. (My drive is large enough, but when I was partitioning my drive I read that it is good to make / as small as possible.)

What to do?

1) Can I use a program other than MythTV with similar features?
2) If not, can I upgrade to qt > 3.0?
3) If not, can I upgrade to KDE 3.0?
4) If not, can I upgrade to Red Hat 7.3? (I can add another hard drive and mount / from it.)

Any recommendations? Is anybody else currently running a PVR?

Thanks,
Jason

Answers...

1) No idea. :-)

2) Yes. Take your RH7.3 CDs one by one, and mount them. In RedHat/RPMS/, you'll find some RPMS called "qt-*", which are (probably) the qt3 ones, and some others called "qt2-*", which are the backwards compatibility ones for "old" QT. You may find you'll need to install more than just those. You'll probably need to copy them somewhere so you can install them all at once, with one RPM command line.

3) As above, but harder. :-)

4) There's more than one way to skin a cat. None of these are supported by RedHat. Or me. :-)

a) Using APT to upgrade RedHat:

Look at the "apt" package on http://freshrpms.net/ and consider - if you can - copying all the RPMs off all the CDs, making a repository, and doing apt-get dist-upgrade - there's a little more to do than *just* that, though. You'll need, as I understand things, twice as much diskspace as the RPMs take up, *plus* enough to install the packages. Good luck. :-)

APT is handy to have about anyway, incidentally. It's my RedHat Top Tip, even if it makes purist RedHat users a little confused, and Debian users *really* confused.

You can also use existing, online repositories, and judicous use of "apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get install", to save yourself disk space. I've upgraded boxes from RH7.1 to RH7.3 using this, and from RH7.3 to RawHide, too. It works, but you'll need to have some smarts about you, since the RPM port of APT doesn't *always* know what's going on.

b) Manual upgrade.

Alternatively, if you've got less space, try copying all the RPMS from all bar one of the CDs to somewhere, and do "rpm -Fvih */rpm /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/*.rpm". Which *might* work.

What you're asking rpm to do here is Upgrade anything that's already got a previous version installed. But not install anything new. Since some packages will want entirely new rpms installed, this usually doesn't work straight off, but rpm will let you know what else needs to be installed, and you can fiddle, much like (2) and (3) above, but more so.

c) The Simple But Violent.

Finally, possibly the best way would be what we in the tech-trade refer to as a reinstall. Just backup what you need, and start over. No upgrade, just Install. Wipe the box.

With any of these, especially anything in (4), you'll want to have backups of your system. You may, with any of these, end up *having* to reinstall even if you didn't want to.

Thanks for the quick and helpful response. I'll do a little more research on the suggestions you posted, and then I'll post the approach I decided on.

I'll be sure to take a look at the apt utility. Anyone else have thoughts about apt?

Thanks,
Jason

I decided to give option 2 a shot: trying to install qt3.0.3-11. When I tried to upgrade to this version, I ran into a lot of dependency problems. However, your comment reminded me that I could install qt3.0.3-11 and still leave qt2.3.1-5. That way, I'll get the functionality of the new library while not breaking anything that depends on the old library.

When I tried to install qt3.0.3-11 (instead of upgrading), I got a single dependency: libcups.so.2. A little searching at rpmfind.net and google.com and I discovered that cups-1.1.1-4.i386.rpm provides this file.

When I tried to install cups-1.1.1-4.i386.rpm, I found that it conflicts with lpr. So, I thought, why not just extract libcups.so.2 without installing the package. Again, from google, I found that I could use mc to extract a file from an rpm. I extracted the file and copied it to /usr/lib/libcups.so.2.

Now, when I try to install qt3.0.3-11, rpm complains:

error: failed dependencies: libcups.so.2 is needed by qt3.0.3-11.

What next? What should I do?

Thanks,
Jason

When RPM says "I need libXYZ.so", it actually means "I need /an RPM which provides/ libXYZ.so". So extracting files rarely helps, I'm afraid, and at best, it'll only confuse you greatly later.

However, in this case, try installing both cups and LPRng from RH 7.3.

You'll probably find this solves the situation for you. On my RH7.3 box, which has LPRng installed already, 'apt-get install cups' tells me it wants to install 'htmlview' as well, so you may need to install that as well.

I discovered my problem was trying to upgrade RedHat instead of installing RedHat. Since I had /home on a separate partition, I chose the install option, but did not format the /home partition.

After the install, I found I still had all of my data left. My Gnome settings, my Mozilla bookmarks, my Inbox...everything worked perfectly. How cool is that?

How could you do this with M$ Windoze? I guess you could set up all of your data on a separate partition, and then configure each and every program on the application partition to store data on the data partition. Then, when you need to re-install the OS, you could install the OS onto the application partition, re-install every application you want, and then re-configure each program to read data from the data partition. How is this easier??