Tvheadend

However, it does not wakeup for scheduled recordings. What do I need to change to make it do so?

You need a script to set the pc's real-time-clock wake up time afore it goes to sleep/shutdown

I would start by reading this

http://www.tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Wakeup

and then post back if you get stuck

It seems to be a permission problem, but I am too much of a novice to know how to fix this.

Definitely sounds like a permission problem. There must be a simple gui solution to this (as you are running Mint) rather than me dragging you into the shell to attempt to diagnose and fix. Hopefully someone with experience of the gui tools available will chip in and help on this one ...

Thanks for that - I hadn't realised that resuming would be so involved, compared to Windows.

For the timebeing, my first job is to actually record something - after days of trying formatting, messing with permission, changing recording paths, I have not been able to successfully record a single recording on my hard drive.

All it ever says is "status: waiting for program start".

I am completely out of ideas and cannot think of anything to try other than trying another distro like Ubuntu.

A L wrote:

Thanks for that - I hadn't realised that resuming would be so involved, compared to Windows.

For the timebeing, my first job is to actually record something - after days of trying formatting, messing with permission, changing recording paths, I have not been able to successfully record a single recording on my hard drive.

All it ever says is "status: waiting for program start".

I am completely out of ideas and cannot think of anything to try other than trying another distro like Ubuntu.

Well, considering that Mint is based on Ubuntu, you'll have to check out other distros. Debian, SUSE and Arch are all viable options.

Other things to check: you said your tuner and channels are all working. Does your current Tvheadend setup stream? Timeshift? Guide? Have you tried recording to something other than your external drive? Do you have fstab entries for your external drive, or .mount units to ensure consistent mounts and availability?

Not to be a wet blanket, but ls -l /mnt/ will only show you what is in the /mnt folder. While this is classically where one would mount foreign filesystems, most distros tend to leave this directory alone for the user to manually manage.

To see all mounted filesystems, you can use mount; but that can be rather verbose. df will show all filesystems with their mount points and free space; another useful command is lsblk which does similar but can give you additional hardware info, too.

Most modern distros use the /media directory for mount points; another place that is often used is /run/user/[UID]/media. I'd recommend checking out the man pages for mount, fstab and systemd.mount to get a better understanding of how filesystems are mounted and handled.