Thoughts on Linux

Every couple of years, I install linux and play with it for a while.
The hacker in me likes the idea of an alternative operating system, and I've always been a bit of unix fan.

So I recently purchased a second media PC, and I thought I'd set Myth up on it as a comparison to MCE.

The one thing I always seem to forget when I setup Linux is that you have to plan in advance and buy hardware that has good support. This time was no exception and I bought an Asus P1-AH1, which is relatively new and although the NVidia 6150 was supported, I had all sorts of problems with the audio part, although the latest ALSA drivers do mostly work.

Now it's been a while since I last installed linux, so I looked at a number of different distros. I started with Gentoo, which really is a hackers only apply distro. The nice thing about the distro is that it has excellent documentation and the Wiki has walkthroughs on most interesting problems. The walkthroughs often aren't complete enough to solve the specific issue, but there are usually enough clues in them to allow you to trouble shoot your issue.

I had Gentoo mostly working, but I had some issues with 64 bit binaries, notably the lack of a flash player. So I decided to try a 32 bit install and swapped distros to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is at the other end of the spectrum, install is painless and when your done, you have no source and not even a C compiler installed. Since I was having issues with my audio, and needed to rebuild the latest Alsa drivers, I had to install all the dev related stuff anyway.

Having gotten everything working I was actually of the opinion that Ubuntu is actually more work than Gentoo, if the distro doesn't have binaries that will work for you.

So I reinstalled Gentoo, this time the 32 bit version, everthing is woking, but I now have performance issues with video playback, I'll track them down later....

Overall linux is much as I remember it, I'll still be running windows on my main machine.