stranger on the net

So… my MythTV (linux TiVo, digital “video” recorder) box died a while back. When I got the hardware back up and running my software was ofcourse outdated – and the update function gave me some weird error about virtual libraries. Heeding a friends advice, I set of trying to install Ubuntu instead of my nice old gentoo…
Claiming that install was a breeze and updates just as quick and simple as I remember from back in the old RedHat days I bought his arguments for using Ubuntu and downloaded an installation CD.

Well, installing seems to be easier said than done. I believe my problems stem from the fact that I decided for a server install instead of a preconfigured desktop install. Anyways, my first attempt using the Wizardry-like simple server setup resulted in a bootable Ubuntu server with no network. However hard I tried to convince the stuff to setup networking I failed (even though networking worked fine during install!)… so I decided to try the expertly-like server-expert setup options. A lil’ hour later I had a fresh server installed, and wooo I even had networking! Next, I wanted Gnome (a graphical user interface for linux’) so I used the install manager to download and install all the packages… high on exciteing linux stuff I quickly punched in “startx” to launch the GUI. Wooo! A screenfull of linux-techno-jibber-jabber-gibberish that looked very much like a head ache inducing error message…

So, that was it for me and my Myth box… We’re going back to gentoo. Sure it’s slower to update, sure it has it’s weaknesses like eliminating all your hard-worked-out configuration files… but at least it let’s me decide for the most part what’s happening – and the docs doesn’t say “not yet done”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 13:46 and is filed under soapbox.