I have friends who swear by their TiVos. “You’ll never watch TV the same again,” they say. And frankly, I’ve been jealous of those friends. Well, I’m jealous no longer.

No, I didn’t get a TiVo. I built a MythTV. I’m still not quite done with it, but I absolutely love what I’ve got.

What do I have? I have a PVR-250 tuner card and an ATI Radeon 9250 graphics card plugged into a three-year-old AMD Athlon +1800 XP box with 512M of memory running Fedora Core 3. Right now I’ve only got 65G of storage, but that’s enough as long as we’re not planning on archiving anything for the long term.

I got started by consulting Jarod Wilson’s HOWTO. Following his advice I used LVM to get my two 40G hard drives set up using XFS. My first big departure from his rather explicit directions came when it was time to set up the video card. This part took some doing as you really should use the ATI proprietary Linux driver. I couldn’t convince the Mesa driver that comes with XFree86 to do anything, but configuring the ATI driver didn’t take that long, although there was a bit of trial and error involved.

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