[mythtv-users] Absolute newbie stumped

[Nick Rout]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 4:33 PM,  <stefan_jones at comcast.net> wrote:
> Thanks for everyone pitching in about their favorites.
>
> I wasn't aware that Mythdora was a distribution . . .  I thought the
> original Newbie poster was referring to the Fedora Myth(TV)ology how-to I
> used three years ago.
>
> Honest question regarding "appliance" distros:
>
> What do you do if something goes a bit flaky?
>
> I have two examples of linux-fiddling I've had to do to keep my MythBox up
> and running.
>
> * Early on, my two capture cards were swapping IDs. The Happague and pcHDTV
> cards came up tied to the wrong providers. I used some instructions I found
> here to change modprobe behavior. (As I recall, it's been a few years.)
>
> * When my local Comcast office went digital, I had to manually scan and
> identify the channels; the built in scanner just wasn't up to the job. I
> installed a dvb utility package and used scripts and procedures on the
> MythWiki.
>
> This may sound dumb, but do the appliance distros have a X desktop (KDE or
> whatever) and package managers so you can install packages?

knoppmyth has a package manager - well hold on knoppmyth is now LinHES.

knoppmyth is based on debian so has apt.

LinHES is based on arch so has pacman

They all have some form of window manager, its not like trying to run
extra apps on your DVD set-top box. Its just set up to not need
anything other than the myth gui 99.9% of the time. But it probably
won't be KDE or gnome, they're just too heavy for what is needed.

To a lesser extent mythbuntu provides much the same - I think the
desktop is xfce.

Anyway an awful lot of maintenance is done from the command line.