[mythtv-users] gentoo, latest mythtv - mythfrontend has no text

[Jarod Wilson]

On 07/01/2009 09:28 AM, John Drescher wrote:
>> On Tuesday 30 June 2009 18:38:54 Brian Wood wrote:
>>> Gentoo is good for some purposes, not good for others.
>> s/Gentoo/<any distribution of your choosing>/
>>
>
> I believe gentoo excels when you have at least a modern machine and
> your primary application that you use is something that is actively
> being developed. mythtv and wine are two great examples. In portage
> there are 40 or so versions of wine. And with mythtv the svn ebuilds
> are easily extended to any rev. Also since the ebuild format is easy
> to understand (at least to me) patching these packages to extend the
> functionality or to fix a bug is pretty easy. I have patched versions
> of both wine and mythtv in my gentoo overlay. The patched version of
> wine applies a fix for the WC3 save bug while the mythtv ebuild
> applies JYA’s patches for VDPAU, HDPVR and the opengl patch. These
> ebuilds took me less than 20 minutes to modify from the base ebuilds
> so it is not like it was that much work.

Sounds no different than what I do with Fedora and my own RPMs. ebuild, 
rpm spec file, potato, potahto.


>>> But getting binaries compiled for your machine, instead of generic ones that
>>> are supposed to work for anyone, is a plus. For example, using "optimize for
>>> size" helps a lot if you're running a cache-starved CPU like the VIA chips.
>> My thing is this: the systems that benefit the most from such
>> optimization are the ones most painful to compile on, because they're
>> so damned slow to begin with. A 1% performance gain means squat on a
>> quad-core box.
>
> To me the reason for wanting gentoo, is not about optimization but
> more about stability, customization, freedom to choose what packages I
> want and never having to reinstall.

I never *have* to reinstall Fedora either. I'll grant you that Gentoo 
does make it much easier to get rid of unwanted cruft though (like, say, 
pulseaudio).


>>> My first Myth experience was with Gentoo, and that gave me a much better
>>> understanding of what Myth was and how it worked than I might have got from a
>>> pre-packaged install. It especially taught me a lot about what Myth depends
>>> on to work.
>> I'm not sold that it really gives you a better understanding of how
>> MythTV works if you're doing more than just painting by numbers. I'd
>> say I have a pretty good understanding of how MythTV works, but I got
>> started with MythTV on Red Hat Linux 9.
>
> I tried to use that (and Mandrake) on my dual core athlon mp back in
> 2003/4 to install mythtv and both ended up being an exercise in rpm
> hell. This was made even worse because I needed a smp ivtv driver for
> my 2.6.4 kernel (I believe that was the version). I was almost about
> to give up on linux again but then I found gentoo. I followed the
> stage 1 install guide and had a working mythtv system in less than 2
> days instead of the several weeks I played with the other two. I know
> this was years ago and things have definitely changed with this but I
> can guaranty that in no way do any of these binary distributions have
> the flexibility of gentoo. I mean I can run the kernel of my choosing,
> the kde version of my choosing, the version of mythtv of my choosing,
> gnome ...

Its Linux. You can can do the same with any distribution if you're 
willing to do some compiling (or find someone else who has already done 
the work for you).


> and it all works with very little fussing. It does take a
> little more time to install than a binary distribution but not really
> that much. And there is also the upgrade path. With gentoo I never
> will have to reinstall the operating system. Between the 30 or so
> gentoo boxes I run at home and at work I may have done 2 reinstalls in
> the last 5 years.

Likewise, I typically only reinstall when I get new hardware. Of course, 
that's actually reasonably often, because vendors constantly throw their 
new stuff at us... Well, I do also have fodder boxes that frequently get 
reinstalled with whatever distro I have to work on a bug for...


>> Granted, Gentoo might force
>> one to pay slightly more attention than with a pre-packaged install,
>> but again, if you're actually trying to understand how things work,
>> you'll get that out of both a pre-packaged install and a source-based
>> install. Assuming "pre-packaged" isn't one of the distros that installs
>> and configures everything for you right out of the box, but rather,
>> installing your distro of choice, then adding MythTV functionality on
>> top... MythDora/MythBuntu/KnoppMyth definitely lower the bar of
>> required understanding, but intentionally so.
>>
>
> It gives you a better understanding on how linux works. One reason is
> installs do not always work. This brings you to the forum where you
> learn how things work and how to fix things yourself.

Its hardly any different than running Fedora's rawhide tree, Mandriva's 
cooker tree, openSUSE's factory tree, Debian's experimental tree, etc.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com