[mythtv-users] Recomended distro???

Mark Abreu mark at gags-r-us.org
Thu Jan 18 01:57:06 UTC 2007


Speaking for myself - a Linux rookie - there are sometimes situations during an install where the right answer isn't always obvious, and sometimes that means a mistake is made.  If you're a rookie it's sometimes easier to do the entire install again rather than try to fix something in unfamiliar territory.  I attempted an FC6 cd-based install about a week ago to do my first MythTV setup.  I probably did it 4 times - sometimes because of mistakes I made somewhere along the way due completely to my inexperience, and other times because I was able to find a bug in the installer that caused it to fail (twice).  After the 4th time I decided to try Mythdora instead out of pure laziness.

And at the risk of offending someone, I've never had to do a Windows re-install immediately after installing it on a clean machine.  More familiar territory with fewer decisions to make.  Sure I've had to wipe many a screwed up machine and install again.


On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:39:58 +0000, Stroller wrote:

Mind if I ask why you've reinstalled the same version of Fedora so
many times?

I mean, I gather from this that you're reinstalling your distro
because it is "br0ken" on your PC. This really says to me that
something more than your distro is br0ken - you might reinstall
Windows when it's playing up, but this is because Windows doesn't do
proper logging, and because its DLLs & registry are an opaque &
undocumented alchemy.

If your Linux distro is playing up then fix the problems with it.
Reinstalling Linux will not magically make any difference, the way it
does with Windows - it will just get you back to the same situation,
but without all the fixes you've already applied! With each problem
try to understand exactly what is happening and why, and take each
step patiently at a time.

Unix is not supposed to be easy - it can be frustrating and time-
consuming, but the pay-off is that anything is possible. I spent
several hours trying to work out how to set the clock on my first
Irix system, but surely learned much else in the process - I would
say, for instance, that `man` pages only make sense once you have
achieved a certain appreciation of their special syntax.

To be fair, it may simply be that Fedora isn't for you. I don't know
that any other distro out there is any "better" or "worse" than any
other, but I think you would be extremely lucky to happen upon the
one distro that does make perfect sense to you during your first
Linux installation.

I think you would be best off downloading Mandriva, Suse, Gentoo,
Ubuntu and maybe one or two others and installing each of them in
turn until you find the one you're completely happy with. One might
respond to this "that's no good - I want my MythTV up & running
straightaway", but there is no-one here who can play match-maker and
be sure they'll pick the right distro for you - just as with women,
one may have to try many before settling on "the right one".

Stroller.



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