When I installed Fedora 7 recently, I found that the menus in MythTV had disappeared. At first I thought it may be related to the OpenGL rendering of the menus, but it turned out to be the theme relied upon the Microsoft Core fonts. There’s a handy guide that allows you to install the MS core fonts on an rpm-based system without breaking the licensing (apparently).

If you’re planning on setting up MythTV, especially if you’re living in the UK, I suggest following the MythTV Installation Guide by Garry Parker. Although it is targeted at Ubuntu, it can easily be applied to rpm-based and other distributions with the right knowledge.

I’ve tried to set up a VPN in the past, to create a secure permenant link between the server on which this site is hosted and my home network. I tried both PPTP in the form of Poptop and ipsec implementation FreeS/WAN. Today I succeeded in producing a nicely routed connection with reasonably low latency, using OpenVPN. I think I’d looked into this in the past but I dont think the documentation was as good back then. Now I’ve found that there’s a simple guide to setting up a basic connection with static keys. If you’re lazy (like me) there’s also a Webmin module for OpenVPN, which provides you with some more advanced options. It probably took me about half an hour to figure out and set up the connection.

The bonus thing is that there’s an OpenVPN client for Windows too! I’ve installed it on Vista without problems, but not got around to testing it yet. If I ever find a use for and get a laptop, and I make the mistake of running Windows, at least I’ll be able to connect into my home network.

Debian Sarge users may find this hint handy if receiving an error saying that the nodes under /dev don’t exist.

… When it refuses to restore for no good reason. I am of course referring to Vista’s disk image backup solution. (more…)