[mythtv-users] Recomended distro???

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Tue Jan 16 18:35:35 UTC 2007


On 1/16/07, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I've re-installed FC6 at least half a dozen times and am back to
> > square one with more problems... "Failed" messages on boot, etc... My
> > other box is a FC4 box that's been up for about a year now, well I use
> > the term 'up' loosely it's had some issues... since the support for my
> > PVR250's disappeared I can't add another box without upgrading to
> > newer version so maybe it's time to look for a new Distro.
> >
> I think this is one big thing that seperates gentoo from a lot of
> other distros. With gentoo you use the install cd once for one release
> of gentoo and never use the cd ( or any other install cd) again
> (unless you really muck things up).

This is true. I've had my dad's machine running 4 1/2 years. He's 78
now and runs only Linux although he cannot administer anything on the
machine. The machine is 350 miles away and is pretty much as up to
date as my machines here.

People should not confuse compile times with difficulty of operation
or installation. Yes, it takes a day or two when you first start
bringing a brand new machine up. However a lot of that is just waiting
for compiles to finish. It's not that much *work* for me. How hard is
typing 'emerge -DuN system' and then waiting a few hours. I have had
far less trouble over the last 5 years as I moved away from RPM based
distros to finally Gentoo only. With the Fedora RPM-based stuff I ran
I had endless problems getting the right versions of libraries to go
with the apps I wanted to run. Gentoo's slotting is really nice also.

Overall, yes, you do have to spend a few days learning things when you
first start. I understand that short attention span types have a
really hard time with this and I do understand. However after that
it's almost no work at all (most of the time!) to keep the machine
happy, health and completely up to date.

I now have 5 Gentoo machines here in my house and 3 at my parents. I
probably spend less than 1 hour/week collectively administering all of
them.

Just my 2 cents,
Mark


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