<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Karl Newman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:siliconfiend@gmail.com" target="_blank">siliconfiend@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im">On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 8:59 AM, Warpme <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:warpme@o2.pl" target="_blank">warpme@o2.pl</a>></span> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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On 1/6/13 1:11 AM, Nick Rout wrote:<br>
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I am looking at updating my backend, made necessary by the fact that it is mythbuntu 10.04 (no myth 0.26 packages).<br>
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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.<br>
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<snip></blockquote><div class="im"><div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> </blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Speaking about Gentoo vs. Archlinux. Brief look at that time showed me:<br>
1\gentoo<br>
+You control EVERY aspect of Your OS (starting from what is on HDD, ending on how binaries were compiled)<br>
-compiles and upgrades sometimes are not so easy<br>
-doing full system upgrade means recompile many OS components<br></blockquote></div></div><br>Just to muddy the waters a little more:<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
<br></font></span></blockquote><div><br>Good post, I used to run gentoo a lot, in fact I ran gentoo installfests and gave talks to my LUG, as well as fanboying to hell. I even built a live cd that would join a compile farm for installfests - bring as many boxes as you can, connect them to the network and boot this - everyone can benefit! I eventually wanted an easy life and migrated to ubuntu. In fact my gentoo experience with mythtv was rough [1], and I migrated to knoppmyth (based on knoppix so debian originally). When knoppmyth didn't produce 0.21 [2] fast enough for this impatient boy I went to mythbuntu. Now I appear to be going full circle, in that the difficulties that the other posters have identified with arch correspond with the difficulties I perceived with gentoo - the config file stuff, particularly if you leave it a long time [3]. <br>
<br>[1] well it was on a retarded VIA Epia box - never trusted VIA with any promises of open source support since then! I am guessing gentoo has come a long way since then - although my primary difficulty was with video playback so not even an issue now I run a separate backend.<br>
<br>[2] or whatever version introduced multirec.<br><br>[3] I still have a gentoo fileserver that I haven't touched software wise for years. During various divorces, house moves and natural disasters it sat in cupboards for much of the last 5 years, and mot all of those cupboards had power or ethernet. I had a look at it a while ago and didn't have a clue where to start in terms of updating. It has a freebsd twin in a similar state. Neither of them touches the internet, so I am not concerned about the security aspect. They chug away. <br>
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