So, when I did the laptop upgrade I formated the root partition which means that working mythtv frontend was erased and it had to be set up from scratch. I had been running version 0.16 of mythtv on all the systems, but finding rpms for that older version looked challenging, so…. I went ahead with the upgrade to 0.18.1 on the desktop first. All went fairly smoothly using Thac’s rpms of mythtv.