[mythtv-users] Which distro for new system?

[D. Moonfire]

Tom Dexter wrote:
>> I'm going to have to second Gentoo.  I had two frontend/backend
>> systems running on Fedora (4 I think, maybe 5).  They were relatively
>> solid but I had a few assorted problems with the rpms/repos and
>> eventually there just weren't any updates available, also, you end up
>> installing lots of stuff that has nothing to do with MythTV.  Then I
>> decided to take a leap of faith and try Gentoo.
>> There definitely was a learning curve going from Fedora to Gentoo, but
>> there's tons of excellent documentation on setting up MythTV on
>> Gentoo.  When you're done you have a lean mean MythTV without any
>> extra cruft that you pretty much never have to touch, except maybe
>> "emerge -uD mythtv" if you want to update.  Also, after going through
>> all that, I feel like I understand better what's going on under the
>> GNU/Linux hood.
> 
> I have to agree.  I tend to hesitate recommending Gentoo for a new myth 
> system for someone not already familiar with Gentoo (I was already a Gentoo 
> user for almost 2 years before building my Gentoo frontend/backend), only 
> because of the potential Gentoo learning curve.  However, I have to say, 
> building my mythtv system went incredibly smoothly with Gentoo.  Gentoo 
> seems to be one of the last distros you see recommended for mythtv, but I 
> really think it's arguably one of the best for the purpose.  I was glad to 
> see others here bring it up.
> 
> Right now the latest stable Gentoo ebuild of 0.20.1 is SVN 13344 and it's 
> really solid.  I made my own customized copy of that ebuild with a few 
> patches I wanted, which is really quite easy to do and well documented.  
> Frankly, most everything about Gentoo is well documented and the forum is 
> awesome.

The only reason I would go against Gentoo is a situation I had where I was
perfectly happy with the machine and didn't touch it for six months or so. I was
unable to update the box after that because enough things changed that the only
suggestions #gentoo could give me was "reinstall".

Now, in my household, my wife specifically told me not to play with the box
unless it was broken, so worry about being unable to update in 3, 6, 12 months
later because of emerge/portage changes or something else makes it not really
viable.

In my case, I used the debian-multimedia repository and got everything up and
running in about three hours, including the Debian install. But, as someone else
mentioned, I went with the distribution I knew.

Cheers!

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 252 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20070808/699893c3/attachment.pgp