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

[Jarod C. Wilson]

On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 08:24, Maarten wrote:

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

Ah, but it is much, much more than just Eye Candy atop BSD! (Though it
does look pretty damned good). One of the coolest features never
mentioned is the "network locations" implementation, which allow you to
shift on the fly, instantaneously from DHCP or static addressing (to
multiple pre-defined static IP addresses), from Ethernet to WiFi to
FireWire, etc., from one WEP key to another, shift between associated
VPN connections (PPTP and IPSec), etc. If you ever have to bounce from
network to network, wireless to wired, it beats anything else out there
hands-down. It takes all of one click to change profiles, and everything
is taken care of. (There's more, but I'm already in a steep off-topic
nose-dive!)

> > 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...

I was pretty good at the coding crap back in college, but never liked it
much, mostly because the projects were boring. My boss has seen bits of
what I remember (that was part of the interview to get the job), so he's
pushing me back into it... And the software is actually interesting this
time around, so we'll see what happens. Some day, I might even be able
to do some code work on the Myth front...

> mplayer indeed does have "runtime cpu detection", 
> although they give a warning about it being "not optimal".

Ah, okay. I wonder how "not optimal" it is... Could be just a wee bit
more RAM and HD space that isn't optimal, but I suppose it could also be
a noticeable performance hit.

> 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 :-)

LOL.

> Gentoo... I have been playing with the idea of trying that for ages...

Took me a while to get around to it. Finally took the plunge, and really
like it. Compiling absolutely everything and still having a nice
dependency resolution system is very cool, but it takes so damned long
to get going, I just can't see using it on production systems in a large
environment...

> Maybe 
> I should now make good on that promise and install it somewhere (preferably 
> somewhere  f a s t  too).

My first run was on an EPIA M10000. Wow, that took some time. My second
run was on a dual Athlon MP 2000. Much quicker! But still rather
time-consuming (and then I blew a PSU and Athlon MP board in my FC
workstation, so the Gentoo box lost its mobo -- replacement coming
soon...).

> 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!).

Unless you're running a high-availability cluster, where taking one node
out of operation for an upgrade has no noticeable impact on services, of
course. (I'm not that lucky (yet) either).

> That is 
> where debian really shines, for those colo boxes.

Red Hat 7.3 on my colo boxes, and most of our in-house Linux servers
(mixed with Win2k Server) and dev workstations. But all with apt-get
added!

> 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.

I can't imagine using Linux without apt-get (or emerge) anymore.

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

I was there not too long ago...

> > "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...  ;-)

Likewise. Well, I think I'm not too old yet (26), but I hate that stupid
moron wannabe-hacker writing crap. (I'm rather partial to lots of ESR's
work ;-)

> 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.

I think it took me more than just once for a bare-metal MythTV install
to become completely trivial, but yeah, once everything clicks, most any
install isn't so hard anymore.

> The one single exception being, maybe, writing complex iptables scripts.

Ick. Which is why I REALLY like Astaro Security Linux. =)

> 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.

I know what you mean! I'm not scared of the learning curve, but I often
just don't have the time to get past the curve...

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

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