[mythtv-users] Some questions before I breakout the Mastercard

[Maarten van den Berg]

On Wednesday 17 March 2004 23:28, Jarod C. Wilson wrote:

Hello Jarod,

> We're getting a wee bit off-topic for this list with some of this,
> but...

I agree, and I also agree with the bulk of the points you make.  The few I did 
have some comments on are below, I snipped the rest for brevity...

> Neither. xmltv and all its dependencies are individually built into
> their own rpms, all apt-get installable. A single "apt-get install
> mythtv-suite" command installs all the mythtv rpms and all dependencies,
> including the entire xmltv chain.

Okay.  You got me there:  Niiice...  :-)

> Yes, YaST2 is one of the things I *really* like about SuSE. (Along with
> their laptop support). Setting up all those things is pretty easy with

Hehehe.  Been there, done that.  :-)  
I have two IBM thinkpads 600X both running SuSE (one 8.0 and one 9.0)
Fine machines, fine distros...

>           ....and probably some vi sessions as well.
>
> No comment. =)

8-)   ;-)

> But you can't get a snapshot of all your installed packages using a
> simple "rpm -qa", which can be *very* helpful when debugging why
> identical (hardware) box A works, and box B doesn't...

That is true.  You know what, I think here my original Linux steps shine 
through...  I started with slack.  Slack had (and has to this day??) no such 
mechanism.  So I guess when I'm stuck I just go back to what I know will 
always work: Pick up a tarball and let autoconf do its (amazing) job.  :-)

> Assuming you aren't installing on identical CPUs across multiple boxes,
> yes, though not by much in most cases.

From what I understood (for instance from mplayer) compiling multimedia apps 
like these can benefit hugely from SSE / 3DNow et al, so I'm not too sure 
about how little it matters.  As you say, "for most cases" there is little if 
any difference.  I will not pretend bash.c uses many SSE optimalisations. ;-) 

> more, but I've found they often don't work extremely well together. (The
> whole mixing of stable, testing and unstable seems to require a fair
> amount of repo tweaking to get things just right for everything I
> wanted).

Yeah... I'm still getting to grips with debian.  I consider myself a debian 
newbie... this despite my 7 years linux experience.

That's why I basically followed your advice (before hearing it) and stuck with 
SuSE.  I knew that I probably needed 'leet linux skillz' to install MythTV so 
I went for the distribution I was totally at easy with.  Instead of Debian. 

Well, it's been nice chatting...  :-)
Maarten