[mythtv-users] Questions about new hardware purchase

[John Drescher]

>  My current Myth box is the first one I built (and rebuilt) from an old
>  PC, and parts I had lying around or purchased with gift certificates,
>  aka "fun money." Since that system is becoming unreliable, I am ready
>  to pay this time (only because my own source of spare parts at work
>  has dried up). Just trying to make sure I get it right without
>  breaking the bank. Seems possible with your suggestions.
>
>  Gentoo, huh? I've tried Fedora, Ubuntu, and currently Knoppix... I'll
>  look into it.
>
It's a lot more work to get installed and it will take much longer to
install but for me it works very well. I know the situation is much
better now but initially I found gentoo because I could not get
mandrake or redhat to work with mythtv in 2004 on a dual processor
Athlon MP board and an ivtv card. Using either of these operating
systems then with smp, ivtv and mythtv for me was an exercise in rpm
hell... I tried gentoo and (although it took forever to install)
everything worked right out of the box. At that point I was a windows
programmer/user who was not sold on using linux. I started out dual
booting between windows and gentoo but after a few months I ended up
using gentoo much more often since it worked well allowed me to play
my favorite game and did not crash. On the same hardware I got a BSOD
once a week with XP. A few more months passed and my XP drive died and
I did not even bother to try to recover it. That box served as my
master backend till last year when it began to have problems with the
ivtv card on hot days. Instead of debugging it I switched my master
backend over to a faster dual processor Opteron that I was using as a
slave backend/ frontend and my main desktop.

Do I recommend it to others? That depends on how much time you want to
spend. Installing gentoo for the first time will take several days.
Remember gentoo is a source based distribution. And at the moment it
will be very difficult being that there is a serious problem that
makes upgrading from the current cd release (2007.0) to the current
stable packages very difficult. Although there is a workaround. You
have to install the base system without the gui. Then upgrade expat to
version 2 and then install the gui. And all of this must be done from
the shell and not the fancy gui installer.

However the good thing about this process is once you install gentoo
you will never need to install from cd again . Well at least I never
upgrade via the cd and I never reinstall. You just upgrade every few
days over the network and thus you can stay always current.

John