[mythtv-users] Distro of choice?

[Shawn Willden]

Michael Haan wrote:

>I agree.  i don't think it's so much the optimizations as it is the
>reduction in software bloat.  Although, it is nice to know I'm running
>64 bit sw on my 64 bit CPU and to know that portage supports 64 bit sw
>distribution, whereas apt-get does not.
>

My desktop is a Athlon64 running the AMD64 version Debian unstable.  
There are only about 200 packages of the over 10,000 currently in Debian 
that don't build and run fine as 64 bit software.

You can download a 64-bit net installer CD (either Sarge or Sid) from:

     http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/install-images

See the Debian ports page for links to all the details.

The AMD64 port won't be "official" until Etch is released (which 
probably won't be until sometime in 2007, on the normal Debian release 
schedule) but I suspect that the popularity of the AMD64 platform will 
cause it to become officially supported during some Sarge point release.

The only reason official support matters is if you want to run an AMD64 
port of "stable", complete with updates by the security team.  IOW, for 
important production servers.  Most desktops should run testing or 
unstable anyway.

A couple of other downsides, currently, to the Debian AMD64 port are:

1.  I don't know of any repository that provides apt-gettable binaries 
for MythTV.  Apt-get source --build seems to work just fine, though, 
using the same source repository I'm using for 32-bit Myth binaries.

2.  I think the Gentoo support for 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system is 
better, at the moment.  That's being worked on, and the new Debian 
"multiarch" infrastructure will solve this very elegantly when it's done 
(they could use the "biarch" stuff from the Sparc port, but multiarch 
will be so much better that no one is bothering).  The new system will 
allow an installation to define a whole list of architectures that it 
supports, along with interarchitecture dependencies where they matter 
(e.g. gotta use 32-bit Firefox if you want to use Flash, and 32-bit apps 
have to pull in the appropriate 32-bit libs), and architecture 
preferences (e.g. on this machine I think my preferences list would be:  
K8-64-bit, K8-32bit, K7, K6, i586, i386, i486, since i486 binaries are 
generally slower on a modern processor than i386 binaries).  It will be 
a flexible, long-term solution.

    Shawn.