[mythtv-users] Distro

[Brad DerManouelian]

On Oct 27, 2006, at 9:32 AM, Brian Wood wrote:

>
> On Oct 27, 2006, at 10:18 AM, Brad DerManouelian wrote:
>
>> Wondering which distro is giving people the least frustrations. I
>> considered doing KoppMyth, but is this something I can easily change/
>> add to when required?
>>
>> Some background as to why I'm giving up on Fedora:
>> I was running FC4 for a long time with no problem until one day LVM
>> decided to trash my superblocks - yes, EVERY superblock on my disk.
>> All that work is now gone. So I tried FC5 on a new disk. Ran into
>> dependencies that couldn't be resolved. bind conflicted with some
>> other package and kept trying to re-download the 600MB of packages
>> every time I tried. After the 4th time of adding/removing packages to
>> solve dependencies, I gave up. Then I couldn't get nvidia driver to
>> load. No idea why. I was too frustrated to find out. So I go back to
>> FC4 and haven't been able to get yum upgrade to finish after 2.5 days
>> of trying. 403's, 404's, parser errors. Forget it. It's not worth it.
>
> I'd try and find out what happened to your system. An awful lot of
> people are running FC4 and if it had an inherent problem such as you
> describe I think we'd know about it by now. FC6 is now current, so
> FC4 is pretty well tried and true. What makes you certain it was LVM
> that trashed your disks ?

When my superblock went bad, I did extensive google searches which  
pointed out a bug in LVM on certain kernels that caused my exact  
problem.

>
> Knoppmyth is an "all in one" type Myth installation which includes
> the base OS (Debian-based I believe) and Myth with all its
> dependencies. MythDora is a similar installation based on FC. Both of
> these try and take some of the pain out of installing Myth and I
> think that both succeed pretty well, though not perfectly.

I guess it's the "not perfectly" part I was wondering about.

>
> Axel's famous guide pretty well walks you through installing Myth on
> FC, which is what you may have done in the first place.

You must mean Jarod Wilson's guide which is what I used to set up my  
system on FC4 in the first place. Again.. I'm not willing to risk  
another "lose everything and start from scratch" situation with Fedora.

>
> I suspect you may have a hardware problem, and I'd try and eliminate
> that possibility first, because that will cause you trouble no matter
> what you try and install.

My system ran great for several months before the bad superblock  
issue. If it was a hardware problem, I would have seen it before now.

>
> Having said all that, I've been running a MythDora system for more
> than 6 months without problems, but I do not use LVM. I store video
> on a RAID-0 array, and I simply archive video to DVD against the day
> when that array goes down, as any HDD system will sooner or later.

I have a separate drive for recordings and another one for DVD's,  
photos and music. The only reason I was using LVM is because FC4  
installed it for me by default. Quite frankly, I still don't know how  
to install without it. I'm too stupid to figure out that stuff, I guess.