[mythtv-users] Current wisdom on PVR-150/250/350/500

Sam Varshavchik mrsam at courier-mta.com
Sun Apr 16 04:25:39 UTC 2006


Brian Wood writes:

> 
> On Apr 15, 2006, at 9:12 PM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> 
>> Brian Wood writes:
>>
>>> It's a configuration option, and since they won't give out the  
>>> config  file they used to compile their kernel they made it harder  
>>> than it  needed to be to straighten out.
>>
>> That's not true.  Everything you need to rebuild their kernel is in  
>> the .src.rpm
>>
>> I've done it.  Everything is there.
> 
> OK, I was just going by the following statement in their docs:
> 
> "Fedora Core 5 does not include the kernel-source package provided by  
> older versions, instead, configured sources are available as  
> described..."
> 
> They go on to describe a nine-step process complete with 3 black-box  
> warnings.
> 
> Why is is so complicated, it used to be just install one package, one  
> step, and the package was included. What was wrong with that, unless  
> for some reason they just want to make it difficult.

The answer you got was the correct one.  The size of the full, uncompressed 
kernel source has violently exploded in the space of a few short years. It's 
really mind boggling.  I don't like it any more than you do.  The kernel has 
gotten completely out of hand, and it's got more problems than ever.  One of 
my machines can't boot anything newer than 2.6.13.  Some kind of a bug 
gotten into the interrupt handler of the Adaptec SCSI module, that 
apparently gets triggered on certain hardware configurations.  So I've been 
sitting since last year, with my thumb stuck up my ass, waiting for someone 
to fix it.  Still waiting.

About four years ago -- I forget whether it was Red Hat 5.0 or 6.0 that I 
upgraded to -- something similar happened -- the new kernel was croaking on 
me.  I noticed that "noapic" worked around the bug, and, having the last 
working kernel as a reference, I was actually able to figure out what stupid 
thing someone did to ioapic.c, and I was able to actually fix it.  That 
surprised me, more than anyone else.  But that was then.  This is now.  I 
can't do this any more.  The kernel can no longer be hacked unless you want 
to make a career of it.

Now, throw into the mix a binary black box blob, that who knows what it 
really does, and it just DOES NOT WORK.  Not at least unless someone's 
paying you for this.   I haven't really checked, but I'm pretty sure that 
RHAS is more binary-friendly, and ships with some binary-only stuff.  That's 
because Red Hat gets paid for distributing it.  And they don't get paid for 
distributing Fedora.  That's the key difference.

The full-blown source package is really only needed by someone who's more 
likely to grab a tarball off kernel.org anyway.  Really, very few, few 
people ever need to look at the whole thing.  The current kernel source 
package is a reasonable compromise.  It contains everything that should be 
needed to build external kernel modules.  I was able to build new versions 
of ALSA, lirc, and ivtv using it, and that's more than most people really 
need to do with it.ever do with it.

> Anyway, if somebody can tell me what video card to purchase that will  
> run the software I want to run (which is all open source BTW), with  
> an open-source driver, I will order it tomorrow.

Same here.

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