[mythtv-users] Some questions before I breakout the Mastercard

Jarod C. Wilson jcw at wilsonet.com
Wed Mar 17 17:28:37 EST 2004


We're getting a wee bit off-topic for this list with some of this,
but...

On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 11:39, Maarten wrote:
> > >>>> Suse 9
> > >>>
> > >>> Asking for trouble. One of the most problem-plagued distros for
> > >>> MythTV.
> > >
> > > Ahem.  I beg to differ.
> >
> > And I beg to differ with your differing. ;-) Even with your
> 
> That's, of course, your prerogative.  ;-)

=)

> > step-by-stepper, it sounds like a whole lot more trouble than, say,
> > KnoppMyth/Debian, Fedora or Mandrake. I didn't say it was impossible, I
> 
> Well, for KnoppMyth there is no contest of course, but that distrib was 
> specially built for the task so I submit that that is an unfair comparison.

Not when the original question was "Which Linux distro would be a good
choice?" (with respect to MythTV).

> As for the others, there is no official .deb for Mythtv, so you must find out 
> who offers one and adapt your apt-get settings to include that.

But that isn't so hard if you read the official documentation, which
states:

"Debian packages for MythTV and most of its add-on modules are
maintained by Matt Zimmerman mailto:mdz at debian.org and are available at
http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian/dists/unstable/mythtv/.
Installation instructions can be found on those pages as well. All of
the prerequisites for MythTV are available as Debian packages, most of
them from the official Debian archive."

> Using 
> unofficial .deb depositories is of course, at your own risk.

So is source, to some extent... ;-)

> I cannot comment on Mandrake or Fedora as I never used them.

RPMs exist for both of those as well. Also linked on the same page as
the Debian info above.

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html


> But what I understand from your story is that it mostly depends on who went 
> through the trouble of writing a Howto for all the others to peruse, or even 
> better, make your own RPM.  So _if_ (big if) I would make an rpm for SuSE 9.0 
> it would magically instantaneous become "very easy" to use SuSE 9.0 ?

If you made the rpms and all the dependencies, that would be a huge
step. Then make them easily installable, with automatic dependency
resolution.

> I just glanced at your (it's yours, right ?)

Yes.

> Fedora core Howto and I would 
> hardly call that easy (IF it weren't for the existance of your fine Howto!):

Which is why I wrote it (and thank you ;-). Note that I can do a
bare-metal install to a fully working, fully up-to-date system in about
2 hours, because I've done it a number of times and I know Linux pretty
well, but the document is geared toward those who know nothing at all,
so it touches on a ton of things that someone with your knowledge
probably doesn't need to be told.

> Installing a new unofficial kernel, for instance.  The howto did leave me with 
> one burning question though; you don't mention any installing Xmltv packages. 
> That would mean it's either 1) included in Fedora (quite unlikely IMHO) or 2) 
> packaged into the contributed Mythtv rpm.

Neither. xmltv and all its dependencies are individually built into
their own rpms, all apt-get installable. A single "apt-get install
mythtv-suite" command installs all the mythtv rpms and all dependencies,
including the entire xmltv chain.

> So, once someone makes an RPM for Suse 9.0 which includes all of the things I 
> built from source [lame, xmltv+deps, mythtv] SuSE would be on the same level.
> Right ?

Documentation would help as well, since each distro has its little
differences, but yes, that'd be much closer.

> > know there are a few people running Myth on SuSE 9, but it is hardly
> > the easiest route to take. I'm happy to hear it isn't as bad as it was
> > in the 8.x days, and don't get me wrong, I really like SuSE, but there
> > is definitely more attention to detail and tedium to overcome than
> > other distros. Thus, you're asking for trouble. But if you're
> > determined, you can make MythTV work on LFS if you really want to. I
> > recall seeing someone putting together some MythTV rpms for SuSE 9 just
> > recently too...
> 
> Some distributions excel in other things than others do. For instance, setting 
> up X11, and two bttv cards and two soundcards in SuSE is a breeze, all done 
> fully automatic by the Yast2 tool, including any and all modules.conf lines 
> needed.

Yes, YaST2 is one of the things I *really* like about SuSE. (Along with
their laptop support). Setting up all those things is pretty easy with
Red Hat/Fedora's kudzu also, which will find and configure anything at
startup (or when you manually invoke it), but I do give SuSE the nod for
user-friendliness. SuSE also has much better native ALSA support (though
Red Hat is finally dumping OSS in FC2). And there are certainly things I
don't like about stock Red Hat (which is why I use a number of 3rd-party
repos).

> I've never tried it but I am almost convinced that that same 
> hardware setup in debian involves a whole lot more steps, and probably some 
> vi sessions as well.

No comment. =)

(Okay, I'll comment: in my personal experience, Debian is one of the
most user-unfriendly distros, starting with the installation, but I'm a
long-time Red Hat guy...)

> Debian fully makes up for that by virtue of apt-get, 
> true, but still: every distribution has its own PROs and CONs.  Innit ?

Yes, apt-get is very nice. Even better (for me) is apt-get for RPM.

> > Hrm. I'm not a big fan of doing a lot of mixing of source and
> > rpm-installed software. If I need to install something, I try to either
> > find or build my own rpm for it, otherwise, you're wasting a very
> > valuable feature of the distro. Perhaps not as big a deal for a single
> 
> I agree on rolling your own rpm...  I do not (fully) agree on finding an rpm; 
> I'm kind of a paranoid guy, so before I install just any rpm from a site that 
> google found somewhere, hell must freeze over first. ;-)
> God knows what untrusted code you might install on your box if you'd install 
> something like (note: just a non-existant example!): 
> ftp://redundant.moscow.ru/~jossi/contrib/rpms/mythtv_4_suse_9.i686.rpm

Oh, I don't grab just any rpm. There are repositories I trust, and I
generally stick to those, or I build my own. I agree that you shouldn't
install any old rpm you find out there...

> > Myth box, but a nightmare when you try to scale things up a bit... And
> > upgrading packages from source... Source is great and all, but gimme an
> > rpm (or deb or ebuild) any day over source, even if I have to build it
> > myself (with a little effort building a few required rpms, I have KDE
> > 3.2.1 running on RHL7.3 boxes at work, all from rpms =).
> 
> I had KDE pre-beta 2 running on RH 4.2 in 199(7?), all built from source. At 
> the time no-one had even heard of KDE, and Gnome was not even close to being 
> invented yet.  But I disgress...

=) (And yes, 1997 is the right time-frame for RHL4.2).

> However, I'm a lazy guy ;-) so I never went through the trouble of building my 
> own rpms, maybe I should have.

Makes life much easier for me, since I've got quite a few boxes to
manage, many of which are more or less identical. (I also rebuilt the
entire RHEL3 distro from srpms, but now I'm digressing... ;-)

> Even so, fixing the Xmltv deps jungle without 
> using CPAN.pm would take ages

Nope, not on Fedora/Red Hat! ;-) One-liner: "apt-get install xmltv" (if
you haven't already had it pulled in by installing mythtv-suite).

> and I'm not prepared to go through that hell 
> for 'just' my single personal box.  If it would be for more boxes or even to 
> redistribute, that changes everything, for sure. In the meantime, I'm so 
> fluent in './configure; make; make install' that for me, there is practically 
> no difference between doing that or doing 'rpm -Uvh foobar.rpm'.

But you can't get a snapshot of all your installed packages using a
simple "rpm -qa", which can be *very* helpful when debugging why
identical (hardware) box A works, and box B doesn't...

> (With the added plus that it gets compiled for the CPU you have, so it's 
> faster than a pre-built rpm.)

Assuming you aren't installing on identical CPUs across multiple boxes,
yes, though not by much in most cases.

> On the other hand, I understand that possibly yast online update might one day 
> break Mythtv, for instance when it decides to 'upgrade' a perl XML module to 
> a lower version than my manual CPAN session did.  I'm the sole admin, so I 
> gladly take that risk (I re-run CPAN and it gets fixed).  YMMV.

True.

> > > Incidentally, I'd be glad to help, if you run into problems.
> >
> > Once I finally upgrade my SuSE box from 8.2 to 9, I may have to pick
> > your brain. I know there is already talk about rolling in SuSE support
> > to ATrpms, if possible...
> 
> Also, using the apt-get port to SuSE might help, but I've not tried it out as 
> of yet.  On my todo list...  as so many other things. :-|

I've actually tried it, and found very few good apt repos for SuSE, and
the ones I did find were generally incompatible with one another. There
are a whole lot more Red Hat/Fedora ones, and many of them work together
quite nicely (I have 10 different repos defined on my FC1 workstation
right now, all of which play well together). Debian of course has even
more, but I've found they often don't work extremely well together. (The
whole mixing of stable, testing and unstable seems to require a fair
amount of repo tweaking to get things just right for everything I
wanted).

> To put all this in a different daylight, I'm in the process of migrating some 
> of my boxes to Debian, so I'm obviously not saying SuSE is the best 
> distribution available out there (but NO distribution can claim that)... :-)

And I'm not saying SuSE is a bad distribution either. My thoughts are
quite the contrary. I just don't think its the best choice for a MythTV
system right now. Yes, they all have their advantages and their
drawbacks, places where they shine, etc. (My current work with SuSE is
actually with Novell Nterprise Linux Services atop SLES8 -- VERY COOL
STUFF).

I've used all the major distros, plus a few of the lesser-knowns, and I
just keep coming back to Red Hat (not to mention that 99% of all the
professional Linux work I see in the Seattle area is on Red Hat...).
However, my advice for new MythTV folks isn't "USE RED HAT!", its "use
whatever you're most comfortable with".

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

Got a question? Read this first...
     http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
MythTV, Fedora Core & ATrpms documentation:
     http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/
MythTV Searchable Mailing List Archive
     http://www.gossamer-threads.com/archive/MythTV_C2/
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