[mythtv-users] gentoo, latest mythtv - mythfrontend has no text

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Wed Jul 1 18:59:42 UTC 2009


On Wednesday 01 July 2009 12:50:34 Tom Dexter wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Phill Wiggin<alamar at gmail.com> wrote:
> > But, let's face it.. "a mere $400" isn't exactly chump-change. For an
> > aweful lot of folks, there's no _way_ they're going to be able to just
> > toss out $400 to pick up new hardware.  If you can breathe life into an
> > older system by taking a little compile-time, you can resuscitate and old
> > under-powered machine and possibly get more use out of it.
> >
> > I'm a Gentoo user and I buy hardware more often than I should. (And $400
> > still isn't "a mere" amount of money for me.)  The above argument may not
> > exactly apply to me... But it does apply to many.
>
> At home I do development (primarily LAMP stuff at the moment) on a
> Dell 8250 running Gentoo.
>
> Believe it or not, the laptop I've been using for LAMP development
> when I'm not at home is an old Thinkpad my previous employer didn't
> even want back.  It's a 700 MHz P3 with a 9 GB drive and 265 MB of ram
> on which I installed Gentoo with Fluxbox as a window manager and all
> the stuff I needed for development.
>
> I initially set it up almost as a joke to see how it would go.
> Amazingly it's more than usable.  Upgrades can take pretty long, and I
> occasionally have to wipe /usr/portage/distfiles while it's going
> because I run low on disk :D.
>
> Talk about breathing new life into a machine.

As I said, it's remarkable that most user's needs can be met with a decade-old 
machine. Just goes to show how effective marketing has been over those years.

I've seen lots of management types insist on new machines, even though all 
they do is a little web browsing and an occasional word document. Sort of 
like the boss having the fancy telephone with all the nifty features even 
though his secretary makes and takes all the calls, and she is probably using 
a Western Electric rotary desk phone, or a candlestick.

At least the CPU clock wars seem to be mostly over. Now it's "my CPU draws 
less power than yours", a better thing to be concerned about.
-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org


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