Linuxness

posted in Ian's Blog Rants
Published January 09, 2005
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So, I recently came across an old TV-tuner card that had been disowned, and after spending a few hours fiddling with it I finally got it to work. Anyway, I decided I'd turn my old athlon box into a MythTV setup since I haven't really found anything else to do with it. It's actually been going pretty well, I've got Gentoo linux running on it right now. I still haven't quite grokked how to get linux to recognize the TV-tuner card (and I'm not really sure if my sound card is working), but so far it hasn't been too dificult. Just REALLY REALLY time consuming.

Gentoo is definitely one of the nicer linux distributions I've used; but, in retrospect, it was probably a bad choice for this project. The problem is, Gentoo compiles everything from source, and since this is an older box with a relatively slow processor, even small things take *FOREVER* to install. Just getting Gnome running took about portage about 10 hours.

3D hardware support was also a huge pain with my nvidia card. NVidia has a really slick installation package (well, compared to other linux graphics drivers anyway), but there's quite a few snags you can run into. For instance, I spent hours trying to figure out why the card was limiting my LCD to 1024x768 when I used the nvidia drivers, but ran fine at 1280x1024 when I ran with the default drivers. (It turns out I had to set the IgnoreEDID flag in xorg.conf)

Linux is definitely getting better in a lot of aspects, but it really doesn't seem like it's ready for desktop use yet. Hopefully I can get mythTV running with this TV capture card soon though.
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Ravuya
With ubuntu, installing the nvidia drivers is a matter of apt-get install nvidia-glx. It's VERY nice in that regard.
October 23, 2005 10:56 AM
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