Getting Mythtv installed and running can be a real hassle. In order to make things easier, people have created install discs that take care of a lot of the manual steps. The two biggest are KnoppMyth and MythDora.

KnoppMyth fits on a CD while MythDora is burned to a DVD. I ended up going with MythDora because it includes a lot of extras that KnoppMyth doesn’t.

In the course of getting my Mythbox up and running, I must have installed MythDora 10 times. At least. There was always a problem at some point that required starting over.

The biggest problems I had were with getting what looked like inverted or weird colors on the frontend of the Mythtv application. The colors were messed up enough that they’d hurt your eyes after a while.

In-between one of the many re-installs, I thought I’d try out KnoppMyth. Others had said it was less of a hassle to get going that MythDora, especially if suffering from the inverted color problem. KnoppMyth was easier to install, but horrible to work with.

I only know enough Linux to be dangerous, but working with KnoppMyth was a nightmare. Whatever the desktop system that is installed is horrible. There were TONS of themes to change the look of the menus, but there were few actual menu items to use. It was kind of annoying that there wasn’t even a link to the Mythtv application, but I could set all kinds of options for the display of windows and menus. KnoppMyth lasted about 20 minutes before I did yet another re-install of MythDora.