In the mood for inflicting pain on myself, I decided to upgrade my perfectly functioning MythTV machine, which was running Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary), and upgrade it to Ubuntu 5.10, the Breezy Badger. I didn't have any really good reason to attempt this upgrade, except for a morbid curiosity as to how it would work. Or not work, as the case may be. After performing the upgrade, it seems like apt decided to wipe out all of the MythTV packages, instead of upgrading them to the newest version.

After re-installing these packages, I found:

1. The mythbackend process could no longer login to the MySQL database,
2. The ivtv drivers for my Hauppauge PVR-250 TV capture card were not included in the new 2.6.12 kernel,
3. The IR drivers for the remote control of the PVR-250 were not included in the new kernel, and
4. The "mythtv-themes" package doesn't appear to be in any of the official Ubuntu repositories, rendering the mythtv-setup and mythfrontend programs un-runnable.

So, as it turns out, I spent about 20 minutes doing the upgrading, and about two hours hacking my way through the aftermath, getting the machine to a state comparable with where it was when I started. And it was all finished in time to record the NBC Nightly News, as it does at 5:30 every day.

Fun!

-Andy.