Just like President Bush has declared an end to major hostilities in Iraq, I am declaring the same in my battle against Linux and MythTV in order to built my own Tivo. Last night I was able to get MythTV running to the point that I was able to view the program guide, watch TV (with information about the program that I was watching), and for the coup de gras, I was able to pause live TV.
Sweet.
I am re-purposing my Windows XP machine for this project, and if I am happy with the results, I am going to buy some hardware that is suitable for my entertainment center and can be dedicated to that task.This hardware is somewhat low-spec: dual Pentium III 500’s, 384Mb of RAM, a PCI GeForce 4MX video card, the aforementioned WinTV PVR-250 and a 40Gb IDE disk. My odyssey started over the weekend, when I installed Gentoo Linux on my test machine. Long story short, Gentoo was not the right distribution for me at this time. I wanted something that would install fast, auto-detect my hardware, and the present a minimal amount of pain in order to get MythTV running. Gentoo didn’t fulfill any of those needs – while I managed to get it installed, I couldn’t get the MythTV packages to install. In fact, the install broke on the 2nd package, the perl XML-SAX-Writer package.
So, I ditched Gentoo and went for Fedora Core 2. This has been going much better – to the point that all of the necessary packages installed cleanly, upgrading to the latest kernel was a snap, and I was able to compile the ivtv drivers suitable for the capture card. I did have some problems getting my old SoundBlaster 32/AWE recognized, but I did manage to get that to work after some fighting (I threatened to boot into DOS, and then Linux shaped up).
But, just like in Iraq, even though I have declared an end to major hostilities, there is still more work to be done. I don’t have the TV output from the GeForce card working yet, nor has the remote control that came with the capture card been configured in Linux. I’m sure that just like in Iraq, those last two little bits won’t pose any significant problems… Right?
-Andy.
"I wanted something that would install fast, auto-detect my hardware, and the present a minimal amount of pain"
I'm not on the payrole like some people I know but:
You want Windows.
Regarding the 1,000 deaths thing:
Given that there were about 250,000 troops to start (not even counting for troop rotations), 1,000 dying doesn't impress me or fill me with Michael Moore style outrage. That’s about 55 guys a month. That's a 0.4% chance of getting killed in the 18 months that it's been going on. I wonder what my chances are of getting killed if I walk home through the west side for the next 18 months?
Vietnam was over 300 guys a month including the first few years when we weren't heavily involved.
Am I being a dick? Probably. But these people signed up knowing that they could be killed. It's the military for God's sake.
I'll probably end up ranting about this more over on my blog.
-Mark the Dick
Debiannnnnn!!!!!
apt-get install mythtv
C:\setups\mythtv>setup.exe
Windows is a minimal amount of pain, up until a certain point -- as long as what you want to do is within the confines of what Microsoft has thought of, then you are fine. Anything outside of that, and things get sketchy. I just can't find the same level of deep technical information about Windows on the WWW as I can find about UNIX. I don't know why that is.
-Andy.