[mythtv-users] Questions about new hardware purchase

[Fred Firestine]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:56 PM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  My current Myth box is the first one I built (and rebuilt) from an old
> >  PC, and parts I had lying around or purchased with gift certificates,
> >  aka "fun money." Since that system is becoming unreliable, I am ready
> >  to pay this time (only because my own source of spare parts at work
> >  has dried up). Just trying to make sure I get it right without
> >  breaking the bank. Seems possible with your suggestions.
> >
> >  Gentoo, huh? I've tried Fedora, Ubuntu, and currently Knoppix... I'll
> >  look into it.
> >
> It's a lot more work to get installed and it will take much longer to
> install but for me it works very well. I know the situation is much
> better now but initially I found gentoo because I could not get
> mandrake or redhat to work with mythtv in 2004 on a dual processor
> Athlon MP board and an ivtv card. Using either of these operating
> systems then with smp, ivtv and mythtv for me was an exercise in rpm
> hell... I tried gentoo and (although it took forever to install)
> everything worked right out of the box. At that point I was a windows
> programmer/user who was not sold on using linux. I started out dual
> booting between windows and gentoo but after a few months I ended up
> using gentoo much more often since it worked well allowed me to play
> my favorite game and did not crash. On the same hardware I got a BSOD
> once a week with XP. A few more months passed and my XP drive died and
> I did not even bother to try to recover it. That box served as my
> master backend till last year when it began to have problems with the
> ivtv card on hot days. Instead of debugging it I switched my master
> backend over to a faster dual processor Opteron that I was using as a
> slave backend/ frontend and my main desktop.
>
> Do I recommend it to others? That depends on how much time you want to
> spend. Installing gentoo for the first time will take several days.
> Remember gentoo is a source based distribution. And at the moment it
> will be very difficult being that there is a serious problem that
> makes upgrading from the current cd release (2007.0) to the current
> stable packages very difficult. Although there is a workaround. You
> have to install the base system without the gui. Then upgrade expat to
> version 2 and then install the gui. And all of this must be done from
> the shell and not the fancy gui installer.
>
> However the good thing about this process is once you install gentoo
> you will never need to install from cd again . Well at least I never
> upgrade via the cd and I never reinstall. You just upgrade every few
> days over the network and thus you can stay always current.
>
>
> John
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>

OK, I see, so the advantage is that you can keep up-to-date from
source every few days, rather than install once and turn off auto
updates as I have done for Fedora in the past. It does sound like a
lot of up-front work, as you mentioned. Since it's our only Myth box
and WAF has to be high, and I would like to make a quick transition if
possible, it might not be for me.