[mythtv-users] Some questions before I breakout the Mastercard

[Maarten]

On Wednesday 17 March 2004 19:17, Jarod C. Wilson wrote:
> On Mar 17, 2004, at 05:12, Maarten van den Berg wrote:
> > On Wednesday 17 March 2004 12:44, Kevin D. Snodgrass wrote:
> >> Jarod C. Wilson wrote:
> >>>> Suse 9
> >>>
> >>> Asking for trouble. One of the most problem-plagued distros for
> >>> MythTV.
> >
> > Ahem.  I beg to differ.
>
> And I beg to differ with your differing. ;-) Even with your

That's, of course, your prerogative.  ;-) 

> step-by-stepper, it sounds like a whole lot more trouble than, say,
> KnoppMyth/Debian, Fedora or Mandrake. I didn't say it was impossible, I

Well, for KnoppMyth there is no contest of course, but that distrib was 
specially built for the task so I submit that that is an unfair comparison.
As for the others, there is no official .deb for Mythtv, so you must find out 
who offers one, and adapt your apt-get settings to include that.  Using 
unofficial .deb depositories is of course, at your own risk.
I cannot comment on Mandrake or Fedora as I never used them.

But what I understand from your story is that it mostly depends on who went 
through the trouble of writing a Howto for all the others to peruse, or even 
better, make your own RPM.  So _if_ (big if) I would make an rpm for SuSE 9.0 
it would magically instantaneous become "very easy" to use SuSE 9.0 ?

I just glanced at your (it's yours, right ?) Fedora core Howto and I would 
hardly call that easy (IF it weren't for the existance of your fine Howto!):
Installing a new unofficial kernel, for instance.  The howto did leave me with 
one burning question though; you don't mention any installing Xmltv packages. 
That would mean it's either 1) included in Fedora (quite unlikely IMHO) or 2) 
packaged into the contributed Mythtv rpm.
So, once someone makes an RPM for Suse 9.0 which includes all of the things I 
built from source [lame, xmltv+deps, mythtv] SuSE would be on the same level.
Right ?

> know there are a few people running Myth on SuSE 9, but it is hardly
> the easiest route to take. I'm happy to hear it isn't as bad as it was
> in the 8.x days, and don't get me wrong, I really like SuSE, but there
> is definitely more attention to detail and tedium to overcome than
> other distros. Thus, you're asking for trouble. But if you're
> determined, you can make MythTV work on LFS if you really want to. I
> recall seeing someone putting together some MythTV rpms for SuSE 9 just
> recently too...

Some distributions excel in other things than others do. For instance, setting 
up X11, and two bttv cards and two soundcards in SuSE is a breeze, all done 
fully automatic by the Yast2 tool, including any and all modules.conf lines 
needed.  I've never tried it but I am almost convinced that that same 
hardware setup in debian involves a whole lot more steps, and probably some 
vi sessions as well.  Debian fully makes up for that by virtue of apt-get, 
true, but still: every distribution has its own PROs and CONs.  Innit ?

> Hrm. I'm not a big fan of doing a lot of mixing of source and
> rpm-installed software. If I need to install something, I try to either
> find or build my own rpm for it, otherwise, you're wasting a very
> valuable feature of the distro. Perhaps not as big a deal for a single

I agree on rolling your own rpm...  I do not (fully) agree on finding an rpm; 
I'm kind of a paranoid guy, so before I install just any rpm from a site that 
google found somewhere, hell must freeze over first. ;-)
God knows what untrusted code you might install on your box if you'd install 
something like (note: just a non-existant example!): 
ftp://redundant.moscow.ru/~jossi/contrib/rpms/mythtv_4_suse_9.i686.rpm

> Myth box, but a nightmare when you try to scale things up a bit... And
> upgrading packages from source... Source is great and all, but gimme an
> rpm (or deb or ebuild) any day over source, even if I have to build it
> myself (with a little effort building a few required rpms, I have KDE
> 3.2.1 running on RHL7.3 boxes at work, all from rpms =).

I had KDE pre-beta 2 running on RH 4.2 in 199(7?), all built from source. At 
the time no-one had even heard of KDE, and Gnome was not even close to being 
invented yet.  But I disgress...

However, I'm a lazy guy ;-) so I never went through the trouble of building my 
own rpms, maybe I should have.  Even so, fixing the Xmltv deps jungle without 
using CPAN.pm would take ages, and I'm not prepared to go through that hell 
for 'just' my single personal box.  If it would be for more boxes or even to 
redistribute, that changes everything, for sure. In the meantime, I'm so 
fluent in './configure; make; make install' that for me, there is practically 
no difference between doing that or doing 'rpm -Uvh foobar.rpm'. 
(With the added plus that it gets compiled for the CPU you have, so it's 
faster than a pre-built rpm.)

On the other hand, I understand that possibly yast online update might one day 
break Mythtv, for instance when it decides to 'upgrade' a perl XML module to 
a lower version than my manual CPAN session did.  I'm the sole admin, so I 
gladly take that risk (I re-run CPAN and it gets fixed).  YMMV.

> > Incidentally, I'd be glad to help, if you run into problems.
>
> Once I finally upgrade my SuSE box from 8.2 to 9, I may have to pick
> your brain. I know there is already talk about rolling in SuSE support
> to ATrpms, if possible...

Also, using the apt-get port to SuSE might help, but I've not tried it out as 
of yet.  On my todo list...  as so many other things. :-|

To put all this in a different daylight, I'm in the process of migrating some 
of my boxes to Debian, so I'm obviously not saying SuSE is the best 
distribution available out there (but NO distribution can claim that)... :-)

Greetings,
Maarten

-- 
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware.