Installing HTPC software (part 2)

OK kids, today we are learning how to install the MMS (that is short for My Media System kids) the ´Hard way´.

Nice screenshot showcasing new feature, movie thumbnailing.

Kidding aside, installing the latest, unstable release 1.1.0, is not that hard either. Thanks to nice people in Gentoo (and MMS) community we already have mms-1.1.0-rc1.ebuild available. Using the ebuild the installation is pretty easy, although it has few more steps to it, than the basic stable installation I talked about in part 1 of "Installing HTPC software".

First thing we need to do is create a local portage. Make sure you have /usr/local/portage directory available and create it if not. After that add the following line in to your /etc/make.conf, if it is not already there.

PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"

Then create the following directory structure

/usr/local/portage/media-video/mms

In the directory mentioned above, run following command to download the ebuild. (Sorry about the small print, but the blogger.com loses few letters from it if it is any bigger.)

wget ftp://83.142.84.214/gentoo-ebuild/mms/mms-1.1.0_rc1.ebuild

Then you need to make few changes to package.keywords and package.use files. The first one adds CPU-type detection for MMS package installation and another one tells emerge to use latest available version of MMS.

echo "media-video/mms cpudetection" >> /etc/portage/package.use
echo "media-video/mms ~*" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

Next we "digest" the ebuild to create correct Manifest, then we are going to emerge the MMS.

ebuild mms-1.1.0_rc1.ebuild digest
emerge -av =media-video/mms-1.1.0_rc1

Now emerge should run its course and you should have functioning MMS as a result. Configuration files reside in /etc/mms directory, so start from there, some configuration is needed in several files. You should be able to figure out the needed changes, which of course, depend on your setup.

Before we can actually run the MMS we need to install X server, all we need is the most basic of graphical mode. I for example have no need for a desktop environment like KDE or Gnome. Installing basic GUI is as easy as typing "emerge xorg-server" after that you need to configure the graphics settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but I will leave that to you, since every hardware configuration has it´s own settings. However here is a sample xorg.conf for Mirai DTL-642E500 television with Nvidia graphics adapter.

Once the xorg.conf is ready, easiest way to start MMS with X is to edit /etc/xinitrc file this file gets executed when X is started. So add a line like one below to start MMS automatically on X startup.

/usr/local/bin/mms

More on my MMS configuration in next entry (or one after that), you should be able to go on by yourself, configuring your /etc/mms settings to way you like.


Disclaimer: Thanks for the ebuild and advices on how to get it to work goes to Vitalogy in MMS forums.