[mythtv-users] Recomended distro???

Brad Fuller bradallenfuller at yahoo.com
Tue Jan 16 19:50:23 UTC 2007



Mark Knecht wrote:
> 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.
>   
I have one gentoo pc for audio. It works pretty well. But, I think 
gentoo would be difficult for most people simply because there are 
things that we do that we don't consider hard. We take editing a file 
for granted and we understand compilation.

For instance, I think it would be difficult for a non-technical person 
(best adjective that I can come up with) to learn the use of USE flags. 
Or unmasking. Granted you don't _have_ to know about unmasking, etc. 
But, it's very helpful to be up to date. For instance, I can't view 
Flash sites that are above version 7. Version 9 of Flash plugin for 
mozilla is masked for gentoo. Most of the world has moved to Flash 9.  
That means the user needs to understand how to unmask if he want to use 
version 9 today. It's not hard, but it's just one more thing they need 
to understand.

So far, I like gentoo. I don't have to mess around with all those Fedora 
Core version updates. But, gentoo is not as easy as other distros. like 
Ubuntu, for the casual user.
> Just my 2 cents,
> Mark
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>   


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