[mythtv-users] Backend OS - opinions on Archlinux

Karl Newman siliconfiend at gmail.com
Fri Jan 11 00:04:19 UTC 2013


On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 8:59 AM, Warpme <warpme at o2.pl> wrote:

> On 1/6/13 1:11 AM, Nick Rout wrote:
>
>> I am looking at updating my backend, made necessary by the fact that it
>> is mythbuntu 10.04 (no myth 0.26 packages).
>>
>> I really hate this 2 yearly cycle of updating ubuntu distros, even on
>> LTS. I thought maybe a rolling release like Arch would alleviate me from
>> having to do that.
>>
>>  <snip>



Speaking about Gentoo vs. Archlinux. Brief look at that time showed me:
> 1\gentoo
> +You control EVERY aspect of Your OS (starting from what is on HDD, ending
> on how binaries were compiled)
> -compiles and upgrades sometimes are not so easy
> -doing full system upgrade means recompile many OS components
>

Just to muddy the waters a little more:

My myth combined FE/BE has been using Gentoo for 7 years now. I originally
was drawn to Gentoo because I thought the customized compilation sounded
like a good idea, however that has turned out to be almost a non-factor.
The huge bonus of an OS like Gentoo is in fact the rolling release. I've
never had to wipe and reinstall the OS, and only once have I had to
recompile the entire system (when I switched from an AMD to a recent Intel
chip), and even then it took only about 8 hours with my bottom-end Sandy
Bridge i3. I update the system every day because I prefer to deal with the
significant upgrades a little bit at a time instead of being hit with a
bunch of issues at once. This way if something breaks (rare) then I have a
very good idea what caused it and can focus my attention on it. I've been
through several notable lirc, LCDd, udev, rc upgrades which required
significant config file editing, but I can generally tell which packages
are going to take some time to update ahead of time, and I'll wait until I
have some time available. I've also never gotten stuck in the dependency
hell like I hear about frequently for the binary distributions. A simple
revdep-rebuild will detect broken linkages (seems to be getting more rare
now) and rebuild the affected packages.

One nice side effect of compiling everything is that you are automatically
going to have a suitable development environment set up, and this makes
applying patches trivial. In fact, when an ebuild uses the default
functions, you can just drop a patch file in an appropriately-named
directory and it will get automatically picked up and applied during
compilation.

Having said that, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo to a newbie unless I knew
they were very tech savvy and very determined. The documentation is good,
but it's definitely some (all) assembly required. Probably not as severe as
Slackware is (was?) though.

Karl
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