[mythtv-users] gentoo, latest mythtv - mythfrontend has no text

John Drescher drescherjm at gmail.com
Wed Jul 1 13:28:32 UTC 2009


> On Tuesday 30 June 2009 18:38:54 Brian Wood wrote:
>> Gentoo is good for some purposes, not good for others.
>
> s/Gentoo/<any distribution of your choosing>/
>

I believe gentoo excels when you have at least a modern machine and
your primary application that you use is something that is actively
being developed. mythtv and wine are two great examples. In portage
there are 40 or so versions of wine. And with mythtv the svn ebuilds
are easily extended to any rev. Also since the ebuild format is easy
to understand (at least to me) patching these packages to extend the
functionality or to fix a bug is pretty easy. I have patched versions
of both wine and mythtv in my gentoo overlay. The patched version of
wine applies a fix for the WC3 save bug while the mythtv ebuild
applies JYA’s patches for VDPAU, HDPVR and the opengl patch. These
ebuilds took me less than 20 minutes to modify from the base ebuilds
so it is not like it was that much work.

My overlay with several hundred ebuilds is here:

http://github.com/drescherjm/jmdgentoooverlay/tree/master

>> But getting binaries compiled for your machine, instead of generic ones that
>> are supposed to work for anyone, is a plus. For example, using "optimize for
>> size" helps a lot if you're running a cache-starved CPU like the VIA chips.
>
> My thing is this: the systems that benefit the most from such
> optimization are the ones most painful to compile on, because they're
> so damned slow to begin with. A 1% performance gain means squat on a
> quad-core box.

To me the reason for wanting gentoo, is not about optimization but
more about stability, customization, freedom to choose what packages I
want and never having to reinstall.

> But you really need something fast with a distcc to
> build on a system (such as the previously mentioned quad-core) with
> bearable compile times unless you're incredibly patient. (I'm not.)
> So why not just spend a few bucks on something faster and save yourself
> the pain and suffering? I mean, the Dell Studio Hybrid serving as my
> current frontend has a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, etc., runs
> quieter than an EPIA I've since retired (replaced the board w/an Intel
> D945GCLF2), and cost a mere $400.

I paid around $400 for my 2.83 GHz Intel Q9550 quad core +Asus P5QPRO
+ 6GB of quality DDR2 of memory + ANTEC 650W 80+ last November.
Equivalent systems can be had for even less today. With this box a
total rebuild of everything (800 to 1000 packages) on my system takes
less than 4 hours. To be totally honest Microsoft sponsored this via a
live.com search and a 30% cash back..

>Its got more than enough oomph to
> handle (most of the) 1080p h.264 material I've thrown at it, without
> having to eke out an extra 1% performance by optimizing the bejesus
> out of everything -- it runs stock x86_64 Fedora 11 right now. (But of
> course, now I kinda want to replace it w/something that has nVidia
> graphics to get shiny new vdpau hotness and no video tearing like there
> is w/the 100% open-source Intel solution I've got now...)
>
>> My first Myth experience was with Gentoo, and that gave me a much better
>> understanding of what Myth was and how it worked than I might have got from a
>> pre-packaged install. It especially taught me a lot about what Myth depends
>> on to work.
>
> I'm not sold that it really gives you a better understanding of how
> MythTV works if you're doing more than just painting by numbers. I'd
> say I have a pretty good understanding of how MythTV works, but I got
> started with MythTV on Red Hat Linux 9.

I tried to use that (and Mandrake) on my dual core athlon mp back in
2003/4 to install mythtv and both ended up being an exercise in rpm
hell. This was made even worse because I needed a smp ivtv driver for
my 2.6.4 kernel (I believe that was the version). I was almost about
to give up on linux again but then I found gentoo. I followed the
stage 1 install guide and had a working mythtv system in less than 2
days instead of the several weeks I played with the other two. I know
this was years ago and things have definitely changed with this but I
can guaranty that in no way do any of these binary distributions have
the flexibility of gentoo. I mean I can run the kernel of my choosing,
the kde version of my choosing, the version of mythtv of my choosing,
gnome ... and it all works with very little fussing. It does take a
little more time to install than a binary distribution but not really
that much. And there is also the upgrade path. With gentoo I never
will have to reinstall the operating system. Between the 30 or so
gentoo boxes I run at home and at work I may have done 2 reinstalls in
the last 5 years. I generally upgrade most systems every week or so
but most of the work of this happens by a scheduled cron job at 3:00AM
so I do not notice. I get emails when new packages were built and then
I have the option to install these when I want.

> Granted, Gentoo might force
> one to pay slightly more attention than with a pre-packaged install,
> but again, if you're actually trying to understand how things work,
> you'll get that out of both a pre-packaged install and a source-based
> install. Assuming "pre-packaged" isn't one of the distros that installs
> and configures everything for you right out of the box, but rather,
> installing your distro of choice, then adding MythTV functionality on
> top... MythDora/MythBuntu/KnoppMyth definitely lower the bar of
> required understanding, but intentionally so.
>

It gives you a better understanding on how linux works. One reason is
installs do not always work. This brings you to the forum where you
learn how things work and how to fix things yourself.

John


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