[mythtv-users] Mythmusic/FFTW Problems

[Vincent Colombo]

  Nathan Poznick wrote:

>>Hardware install is a *pain* on Debian.
>>    
>>
>How do you mean?  I've never had any problems with it.  At least that
>kudzu crap doesn't pop up and claim it's going to do something useless
>because there's no longer a mouse plugged in.  I put in a TV card, add
>the module to /etc/modules so it loads on boot, and it's good to go.
>Same thing with a sound card.
>
Yeah, if it was that easy. Maybe you had luck with your hardware. I'll 
save you the details, but I often need a week to get a single component 
working, and that's just unacceptable. I'd like to plug the card in and 
the start an hw-installer of the OS and it recognizes the card and 
installs or at least suggests the right driver module and userland 
packages and configures them. Hardware installation must typically take 
10-60 minutes, as it does on Windows (unless things break).
SuSe is close to that, at least during initial installation (not sure 
afterwards), often better than Windows even. It still doesn't recognize 
exotic hardware, though, even if supported in general under Linux, nor 
do I think it tells me when something is known not to be supported (by 
the best of their knowledge), so I don't need to bother much trying to 
get it working.

Debian essentially has no hardware recognition whatsoever. You have to 
figure out yourself which driver you need (sometimes there are several 
possible ones) and to install it yourself (often the docs are basically 
useless). That alone is too much work for me, and too much to ask for 
the majority of users.

Debian is about the last big distro I would recommend for usage in a 
bleeding edge multimedia machine - just to warn newbies. I would 
recommend to buy a copy of SuSe. But again, just my personal opinion, I 
guess others disagree.

>When I wanted to add a homebrew LIRC
>serial IR receiver that I'd built, I installed the lirc packages with
>apt, plugged in the receiver, and loaded lirc_serial.o.
>
Same did I, and I configured it with debconf, yet the package did not 
write the config correctly, IIRC. I didn't work until I manually 
added/copied a file.

>Yes, Debian security updates for stable typically take a
>couple of days to go in, because they have to be reviewed by the
>security team, but if you're using unstable, a fixed package is usually
>uploaded within an obscenely short time.
>
The initial fix often takes 1-2 weeks longer than on Red Hat. And it's 
not the quality checks which are the reason, because the initial fix is 
often broken and they need to push an update (exactly what MS is 
ridiculed for, BTW). Not even mentioning that e.g. the Mozilla version 
in stable has security holes without end (both in potato back then and 
now again in woody), and noone cares, although they are fixed in 
upstream and I told them.

SuSe does active security reviews.