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

[Jarod C. Wilson]

On Mar 17, 2004, at 15:29, Maarten van den Berg wrote:

> Hello Jarod,

Hello Maarten. =)

>> We're getting a wee bit off-topic for this list with some of this,
>> but...
>
> I agree, and I also agree with the bulk of the points you make.  The 
> few I did
> have some comments on are below, I snipped the rest for brevity...

Cool. I'm probably going to veer even further off-topic, but it could 
be enlightening for the casual onlookers, so hey. Sue me. I write lots 
of directly applicable emails to the list, so I'll grant myself a 
little leeway. ;-)

>> Neither. xmltv and all its dependencies are individually built into
>> their own rpms, all apt-get installable. A single "apt-get install
>> mythtv-suite" command installs all the mythtv rpms and all 
>> dependencies,
>> including the entire xmltv chain.
>
> Okay.  You got me there:  Niiice...  :-)

Yes, very nice, indeed. My first-even Myth install was entirely 
source-based. One apt-get command certainly cuts down on hair loss. ;-)

>> Yes, YaST2 is one of the things I *really* like about SuSE. (Along 
>> with
>> their laptop support). Setting up all those things is pretty easy with
>
> Hehehe.  Been there, done that.  :-)
> I have two IBM thinkpads 600X both running SuSE (one 8.0 and one 9.0)
> Fine machines, fine distros...

My laptop runs Mac OS X (and Yellow Dog Linux, though primarily Mac OS 
X). Its the one *nix that trumps SuSE for a laptop (though of course, 
you must have Apple hardware...). My main desktop machine at home is 
Mac OS X also.

>> But you can't get a snapshot of all your installed packages using a
>> simple "rpm -qa", which can be *very* helpful when debugging why
>> identical (hardware) box A works, and box B doesn't...
>
> That is true.  You know what, I think here my original Linux steps 
> shine
> through...  I started with slack.  Slack had (and has to this day??) 
> no such
> mechanism.

I think I recall reading something about the beginnings of a package 
management system that might finally do that, but I haven't kept up 
with Slackware much.

Though my latest troubles on the "box A works and box B doesn't" front 
turned out to be one machine with its hardware clock set to UTC, the 
other to PST, which causes problems with Samba mounts on Win2k3 Server. 
Files created on the UTC box were showing up on the Windows side as 
being created 8 hours earlier (PST = GMT/UTC -800). What a mess...

> So I guess when I'm stuck I just go back to what I know will
> always work: Pick up a tarball and let autoconf do its (amazing) job.  
> :-)

Very true. I'm getting quite embroiled in writing my own Makefiles from 
scratch at work right now, actually... VERY cool, some of the stuff you 
can do (esp. when you upgrade make to 3.80 from RHL7.3's stock 3.79, 
along with a required autoconf upgrade).

>> Assuming you aren't installing on identical CPUs across multiple 
>> boxes,
>> yes, though not by much in most cases.
>
> From what I understood (for instance from mplayer) compiling 
> multimedia apps
> like these can benefit hugely from SSE / 3DNow et al, so I'm not too 
> sure
> about how little it matters.

For packages like that, I have seen instances where there's multiple 
rpms, i.e., mplayer.i386.rpm, mplayer.i686.rpm, mplayer.athlon.rpm, 
etc. However, I'm noticing that ATrpms has only one mplayer package 
(which I use), and I *do* have full SSE/3DNow support (unless I'm 
mistaken -- its been a while since I've looked at mplayer's console 
output), so I think Axel may have compiled in support for pretty much 
everything, and the binary is smart enough to fall back if the actual 
hardware its running on doesn't support feature X. Adds a tiny bit of 
bloat, yes, but HD space and RAM are both so cheap now... But yes, many 
multimedia apps can benefit considerably from compiler optimizations 
and feature-enabling.

> As you say, "for most cases" there is little if
> any difference.  I will not pretend bash.c uses many SSE 
> optimalisations. ;-)

Heh!

>> more, but I've found they often don't work extremely well together. 
>> (The
>> whole mixing of stable, testing and unstable seems to require a fair
>> amount of repo tweaking to get things just right for everything I
>> wanted).
>
> Yeah... I'm still getting to grips with debian.  I consider myself a 
> debian
> newbie... this despite my 7 years linux experience.

I'm doing the same on Gentoo, but liking it MUCH more than Debian. I 
don't think I'll ever use anything but Red Hat or SuSE in a production 
work environment though.

> That's why I basically followed your advice (before hearing it) and 
> stuck with
> SuSE.

=)

> I knew that I probably needed 'leet linux skillz' to install MythTV so
> I went for the distribution I was totally at easy with.  Instead of 
> Debian.

"leet linux skillz"... Heh...

> Well, it's been nice chatting...  :-)

Definitely!

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

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