[mythtv-users] CentOS vs Fedora, RAID vs LVM

[kanetse@gmail.com]

Here is a contrasting view on CentOS.  I also ran a Fedora-based
MythTV backend for a number of years; but I also was not to pleased
with the relatively short release cycles of Fedora.  In September
2008, I switched over the CentOS 5.  I have always used atrpms to get
all my packages.

Generally, atrpms is excellent at get packages out for all the
distributions.  However, in Fedora I found using 'smart' instead of
'yum' generally made installing packages much simpler -- possibly
because smart has a better conflict resolution.  In fact, I remember
Axel himself also recommending using smart.

When I switched over to CentOS, 'smart' doesn't seem to be configured
in the same way, there seem to be certain repos that aren't configured
to work with it.  I tried to do a little searching, and I think it has
something to do with conflicts between repos, but I wasn't really able
to figure out what the 'recommended' solution was.  See
http://lists.atrpms.net/pipermail/atrpms-users/2008-February/008895.html

After a bit more searching, I did find someone who posted their
smart-repo config file, and tried to modify it to work with my
platform, etc.   However, to this day, I still have to run yum and/or
smart in try and get packages to install completely.  It's not an
ideal situation.


The other problem is that, as some have noted, CentOS 5.x is based off
more stable code, so it's at kernel 2.6.18.  That's all good in terms
of stability, but I believe that there are improvements in certain
area that you may not benefit from.  In my case, I have intermittent
problems with firewire capture, and from what I can tell, a newer
kernel may have resolved these issues.  However, I can't be sure
without compiling my own kernel, which would completely break the
package management and put me so far off the vanilla CentOS config
that it would be difficult to find people to help out.


All that being said, I am still using CentOS on my master
backend/frontend today.  Despite those points I mentioned above, I do
like the idea that there is a longer-term shelf life to the
distribution than Fedora.  However, I probably will upgrade to CentOS
6 over the summer, when the TV season ends (if it's available by
then), possibly in combination with the MythTV-0.22 release (if it's
available by then).