I decided to finally reinstall the Myth box yesterday. I found out some pretty valuable things. First, a lot of the problems with the box can be attributed to the motherboard not liking the large amounts of DMA transfers the WinTV PVR 250 does. I’ll have to remember to stay away from Via chipsets in the future as this chipset also has some flunky problems under Windows 2000 too. Bad Via. Bad bad Via.
Secondly, I’ve also got a weird bios, strike 2 for Via. I burned the minimal Gentoo install CD last night, but it wouldn’t boot. Finally, I gave up and installed Ubuntu instead. I gotta say, it’s a nice desktop opearting system, but there were some things that made it really annoying. First is that there was no way to get a lot of software for it. Specifically, MPlayer and XCdRoast. I figured out how to burn images under Nautilus, but that’s just not as much fun. Apparently this is because of licensing issues.
Also, by default, it installs a VERY stripped down OS. We’re talking no C compiler. This was annoying. It also suffers from Debianism when it comes to kernel compiles. This made it hard to install IvyTV to drive MythTV. Then later I realized that it didn’t install an SSH daemon either. Good for desktop users, bad for Patrick. After sleeping on it and dreading needing to reinstall again in a few months, I decided that I should have installed Gentoo. I downloaded the full CD today, slapped that on a CD-RW and burnt it. Right now I’m installing Gentoo. We’ll see how that works. At least with Gentoo, it’s braindead on how to upgrade it.
I wish that Ubuntu would have worked, I’d really like to support them, but with my needs and the state of the distro, it’s not gonna happen right now. Maybe when the full release comes out, we’ll be better off. Anyway, I’ll see about posting more tomorrow once the compile is closer to being done. Yay for compiling in Gentoo!