[mythtv-users] Distro

Leighton Brough brough at baremetalsoft.com
Sat Oct 28 00:38:38 UTC 2006


Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> Wondering which distro is giving people the least frustrations. I  
> considered doing KoppMyth, but is this something I can easily change/ 
> add to when required?
My first mythbox build used Debian and 0.18, and while I can see folks 
on the list who are happily using this distro, for me it was a world of 
pain. Ultimately choice of distro is largely a matter of taste, I guess, 
and it depends very much on what you want your myth system to do. The 
things that were a bad fit for my mythbox were:

- The Debian release cycle is quite slow, and what is finally released 
is is very "stable" (i.e. not the latest version).

- The install seemed bloated: lots of stuff got installed that really 
wasn't relevant to a dedicated mythbox, especially when I installed X 
support. Also lots of daemons are setup by default, which may or may not 
be necessary.

- The package management became more of a hindrance than a help - mainly 
due to my attempts to install more up-to-date versions of things (e.g. 
PAM, so I could use real-time threads), I found I had a real fight with 
this from time to time.

- I had to compile my own kernel to turn on features I wanted (e.g. XFS, 
if I recall correctly).

Some of the issues above were quite probably due to my lack of knowledge 
of Debian. Also, some of these things are virtues in a different 
context, but not suited to my mythbox.

I'm now using ArchLinux (http://www.archlinux.org/), based on a post to 
this list some time ago which inspired me to check it out. I can happily 
recommend this distro. The things I like about Arch are:

+ There's no bloat in the installation - the basic install is tiny.

+ The boot scripts are simple, and very easy to configure.

+ All packages are very up-to-date and the available range is extensive. 
I have been able to install every dependency as a package from the 
standard Arch repositories.

+ Many features are on by default in the kernel.

+ Everything is optimised for i686+, so a bit like gentoo, you get a bit 
more performance out of your binaries.

+ The package management is excellent: "pacman -S mythtv" run after a 
minimal install will pretty much sort you out. It's really easy to 
upgrade, downgrade and completely remove packages, and all dependencies 
are automatically resolved. The build system is equally friendly.

+ The documentation (Wiki) is suprisingly good for a more minor distro. 
Mind you, it mostly says something as simple as "pacman -S xxx", "edit 
/etc/xxx.conf", since the package management is so well sorted out. The 
install doco is excellent too.

+ The Arch Way (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way)  is 
that system configuration is never hidden behind config tools. The idea 
is that sooner or later you need to know how to edit the relevant config 
files, so you do this from the start (with adequate doco as support). 
The system is designed to be lightweight and simple to facilitate this. 
This suits my taste very well, but if you prefer to use the "cursed 
rolly thing" to setup your system, you're not likely to like Arch.

Leighton


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