Out with old and in with the new

By Greg Turnquist

Greg L. Turnquist worked on the Spring team for over thirteen years and is a senior staff technical content engineer at Cockroach Labs. He was the lead for Spring Data JPA and Spring Web Services. He wrote Packt's best-selling title, Learning Spring Boot 2.0 2nd Edition, and its 3rd Edition follow-up along many others.

February 2, 2016

startrek-ubuntu-bootupI have been waiting a long time to resurrect an old friend of mine: my MythTV box. I built that machine ten years ago. (I’d show you the specs, but they’re locked away ON the machine in an antique mediawiki web server). It runs Root-on-LVM-on-Raid top to bottom (which, BTW, requires LILO).

It was great project to build my own homebrew DVR. But with the advent of digital cable and EVERYTHING getting scrambled, those days are gone. So it’s sat in the corner for four years. FOUR YEARS. I’m reminded of this through periodic reports from CrashPlan.

I started to get this idea in my head that I could rebuild it with Mac OSX and make it a seamless backup server. Until I learned it was too hold to not support OSX. So it continued to sit, until I learned that I could install the right bits for it to speak “Apple”, and hence become a Time Machine capsule.

So here we go! I discovered that I needed a new VGA cable and power cord to hook up the monitor. After that came in, I booted it up…and almost cried. Almost.

As I logged in, I uncovered neat stuff and some old commands I hadn’t typed in years. But suffice it to say, it is now beginning its first distro upgrade (probably more to come after that), and when done, I’ll migrate it off of being a Mythbuntu distro and instead pick mainline Ubuntu (based on GNOME).

One that is done, I hope to install docker so I spin up services needed (like netatalk) much faster and get ahold of its ability to provide an additional layer of home support for both my and my wife’s Mac laptops.

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