[mythtv-users] Mandrake 9.1 LIRC headaches

[Mark]

Mark Edwards wrote:

>I have to confess at this point having never installed Mandrake - and never
>having experienced the headaches you are experiencing yourself now. My
>heritage is primarily slackware and redhat with a brief dabble with debian
>and FreeBSD. Current boxes are currently rh 8 and 9 - one firewall, one myth
>box and a laptop thrown in for good measure. I agree that there is a lot to
>be said for a distro that is not critically dependent on heavy
>customisations at a kernel level. With rh it's perfectly possible to unbzip
>a vanilla kernel and build away.
>
Amen.

>Please forgive the inevitable dig at the dozers, but really the whole point
>of linux is that you know what's going on under the hood. 
>
And therein lies the catch-22.  It's a fairly steep learning curve on
linux.  I started dabbling back at Redhat/Mandrake 5.2,
and was pretty well whomped several times before I started getting
somewhat comfortable with it.  I am not a
programmer by trade, and have self-taught myself most everything I know
about it.

>If a vanilla
>kernel breaks all sorts of stuff on your distro, what benefit is the
>distribution bringing to the party over and above a proprietary OS?
>
Mandrake's claim to fame is that it's very gui-intensive.  While I
started out really liking that coming
from the Winblows world, as I get more comfortable with the command
line, I find it more
obfuscating.  It may be time to try slackware or debian soon, although I
am not keen on taking down
my Myth production box to do things like that.

>
>I am no evangelist for any particular distro, but I would have to ask at
>this point about the value Mdk is bringing to your objective of getting a
>Myth box going...
>
The Myth box is going quite well actually, it was extremely easy to set
up, in no small part because of
the EXCELLENT documentation that comes with Myth, probably better than
most  tarballs I have installed.
The point that has continually eluded me was the LIRC install, which I
have been beating my head on the
wall for WEEKS now.   I tried everything I could think of last night,
and still couldn't get a kernel to compile.
It seems to be crashing at the make dep part working with mod_dvb, which
I admit I did tamper with by removing
some lirc files, but when I go into the make menuconfig, I turn off the
entries I can find for dvb support, so it really
shouldn't be seeing it in the dependency check, but hey, the screen
scrolls so blinkin' fast I can't really tell what's going
on anyways.


I will keep slogging on it though.... sigh.

Mark