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Why -o- why does Debian and Mythtv suck?

This is day two of getting MythTV setup on a backend server. ?I’ve got the front end working on my Xbox.

I’m really getting frustrated with MythTV and Debian. ?From what I have read, Debian is the preferred choice to install MythTV onto. ?Well, Debian has got to be the worst Linux distro I have used!!! ?DO NOT USE DEBIAN… It’s horribly outdated, very clunky, and no one seems to keep the dependencies up to date. ?If you didn’t install something while it was available, you’re screwed! ?Not even Google cache will help!

I can’t believe that the Nokia 770 is based off of this FPOS distro!

Here’s a little background about my Linux experience:

I started learning Linux using Slackware. ?Hey, if you’re going to learn to swim, you might as well just jump head first into the deep end!

I think Slack is the best Linux distro that I have ever used.

I feel that I’m justified to say that Debian officially sucks. ?Here are a few other Linux distros that I’ve installed, configured, and written software that controls firmware functions under:

Redhat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Advanced Server (686)

Redhat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Advanced Server (both 686 and emt64)

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0 (686 and emt64)

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.1 (686 and emt64)

Of course, what I use for servers around my office and my home is FreeBSD. ?It’s an excellent server OS. ?Of course, Apple uses BSD for their desktops, so I guess it’s ok as a desktop too!

Back to the Mythtv install… ?All of the howto’s and the packages.lists that I can find are all very out of date. ?So, this means you can’t just `apt-get install mythtv` as all of the howto’s I have read state to install Mythtv. ?I’ve spent the last two hours hunting down any deb that I could find relating to MythTV… No one seems to be hosting them any more.

Screw this… I’ll get the PVR-150 working in FreeBSD, then I won’t have to deal with Debian – cause it sucks.

2 comments to Why -o- why does Debian and Mythtv suck?

  • Funny how its the opposite with you than me. I got Myth-backend from SVN running on my slackware server in no time. The problems I had was compiling myth-frontend for the X-Box running Xebian (based on Debian). I couldn’t believe how out-of-date all the so-called “stable” packages are on the default install! And since apparently *everybody* just says “use apt-get” to install programs, I was left in the dark as to what to do when apt-get didn’t work because of out-of-date repositories.

    Being the slackware user I am, I ended up building most of my dependencies, such as MySQL, from source on Xebian. Yeah, it “isn’t right”, I know, but MythTV SVN now works basically flawlessly for me!

    If you decide to go to slackware for your myth-server, I can help you build mythtv from source. It wasn’t too hard — just a few dependencies that slack didn’t come with that you have to build, too.

  • erich

    So, before giving up completely on Linux, I decided to try KnoppMyth. Worked great as a stand alone all-in-one-box Myth solution.

    After Brian helped me change the Xbox MythTV settings, the Mythfrontend loaded but I needed either a keyboard or a remote to configure it…

    So…

    I soldered a USB connector to the controller plug… so that I could use the keyboard to configure MythTV frontend on the Xbox. Once the front end was configured, I discovered that the frontend was using 0.19 and the backend was using 0.18.

    Guess what didn’t work?!?!

    So… Time to install Slackware and use all the dependencies that Brian already had to find!

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