[mythtv-users] Questions about new hardware purchase

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 12:45 PM, Fred Firestine <ffluvssg1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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>  >
>
>  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.

My wife BECAME a Gentoo user in no small part because of how well our
Myth system works. We have 4 dedicated frontend machines, all Gentoo,
and a Gentoo backend server.

It is work, but with some forethought it can now be far less work that
a few years ago. If you can stabilize your USE flags with a consistent
set across machines then you can build binary packages one one
machine, out of the wife's way, and then jsut deploy those binary
packages to the other machines anytime you want. It's actually more
flexible and FAR faster than loading a new Fedora upgrade once you
learn how to do it. However learning how to do it is NOT something you
should do on a machine that requires any WAF.

- Mark