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

[Maarten]

On Thursday 18 March 2004 09:01, Jarod C. Wilson wrote:
> On Mar 17, 2004, at 15:29, Maarten van den Berg wrote:

> 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.

Mac OS X. Ah yes.  I've seen it.   Eye Candy on top of BSD. Who can top that ?

> 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).

I sadly lack coding skillz, so my involvement with Makefiles and autoconf is 
limited to parsing such outputs and fixing what it complains about.
And, well... reading C sources, but mostly what is enclosed by /*     */  ;-)
And a little bit of shellscripting...

> 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.

You're completely right, mplayer indeed does have "runtime cpu detection", 
although they give a warning about it being "not optimal".
Nice to bring that up BTW, when looking for the exact sentence (on console) I 
noticed that my mplayer is still compiled for the CPU that used to be in this 
machine (dual celeron366 versus athlon 1400)... I need to recompile :-)

> 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.

Gentoo... I have been playing with the idea of trying that for ages...  Maybe 
I should now make good on that promise and install it somewhere (preferably 
somewhere  f a s t  too).

I'm really "in between" right now. The thing that always bit me with SuSE is 
its short lifespan of 2 years (we didn't use the enterprise versions). We 
could not just take the webservers and firewalls offline one by one and start 
a CD upgrade process(and see what gets broken and what doesn't!).  That is 
where debian really shines, for those colo boxes.  
But my guess is that anything that should run X11 will remain a SuSE 
installation for me.  But even then, apt -get remains real attractive. 

But as it is I was recently laid-off so it's not my problem anymore. I'm 
looking for a new job...

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

Yeah, I feel I'm really too old to write "l337 l1nu)( 5k1llz".  Also, I'm a 
whitehat, not a blackhat, so it wouldn't be fitting anyway...  ;-)

Before knoppmyth existed, MythTV had something of a reputation...
The funny thing is, and I observed that with ALL software packages, the moment 
you did it _once_, it very soon becomes totally trivial to install.
The one single exception being, maybe, writing complex iptables scripts. 
All the rest just gets trivial, from configging X with two monitors in 
xinerama mode, all the way through to managing DNS or mail systems or 
figuring out the x.509 framework.  But that initial 'steep learning curve' is 
still often what keeps me from trying out a lot more stuff than I do. 

Maarten

-- 
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware.