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Screencasts of Installing MythTV Via MythDora 4.0
peterdaly writes "MythDora 4 is a MythTV 'in-a-box' style distribution based on Fedora Core 6. With the help of a RedHat employee and author Jarod Wilson, MythDora 4 has made great strides in hardware compatibility and ease of installation. It is designed to format your hard drive and install everything needed for a fully functional MythTV System. MythPVR.com has created a three-part screencast of the installation process covering MythDora installation, configuration, and MythTV setup. If you have had problem installing MythTV in the past due to hardware compatibility issues, it might be time to give it another chance."
Meh, the same is true of Fedora, which is what I used to build my myth front/backends. Honestly, why all the hate?
As usual with open source projects, it is assumed that everyone has a considerable amount of knowledge already. They could have told people what Mythdora is and what MythTV is, for example.
This should not have been the first sentence on the first page: "The new and much improved MythDora 4.0 is finally ready. As you will see, things have improved greatly."
However, other than that it is looking excellent, for people who have a lot of background knowledge.
The Hauppague PVR-150,250, and 350 are the best game in town for tuners. Fry's sells the PVR150 for $120 if you have to get it right away, or I've seen them online for as cheap as $60 for plain box with no remote. You can do remote through your LAN I just built a MythDora 3.2 box (doh! Could have done MythDora 4.0!) and it works quite nicely on a P3/850 with an NVidia 6200 based video card with S-Video out. Just this last weekend, I rebuilt the thing with a 320GB drive instead of the tiny drive I had lying around so it wouldn't run out of space so quickly. It also sounds a lot less like a jet engine when running. More info here: www.mythtvtalk.com Check out the forums.
Getting a remote to work isn't worth the trouble. I have a PVR-250 in my Myth machine and I ditched the remote for a wireless keyboard a while back. Much easier.
People care about avoiding lawsuits and yet it looks like one of the major suppliers of MP3 players recently lost a large patent infringement lawsuit earlier this year to the tune of billions of dollars (no doubt an appeal is pending). If the patent holder isn't paid off, the patent holder has the power to create a huge hassle for lots of ordinary people who will turn to their proprietor and ask why they didn't charge enough money to pay for the requisite licensing fee (or why a loyal customer would be left to the ravages of the lawyers). Just ask Apple about Paul Heckel's ability to get an undisclosed sum from them over patents that were allegedly infringed in Hypercard (or so says Heckel and his patent lawyer). People do not benefit from living a life where they are spared the harsh reality -- the US patent system as it pertains to software -- that exists for so many others. Lashing out at people for making you aware of that reality won't help people avoid these dangers.
As for software not being political, that has never been the case. Any activity involving multiple people is political; computer software is no exception. Only the naive believe they can divorce themselves from politics. While it can be unpleasant learning that computer-related work is filled with political ugliness you were unaware of; learning that the lives of others is more harsh than you knew. But it's worth knowing so that you can better understand how things really work, behave ethically in accordance with your newfound knowledge, and sleep easier.
Digital Citizen
It wont play them until you install a DVD decoder. Pain in the rear if you ask me....
Cecil, you are living in a dream world. Most people don't RTFM. Even when asked. Even if it brought world peace, turned lead into gold and allowed cars to run on water.
Easy to use means not having to open the manual, that the screen tells you everything you need to know, such that a 5 year old can learn to use it. It is this very familiarity that keeps Windows on top, because it is what people know. Linux has to fight this mentality. It is a shame that so many Linux enthusiasts don't understand this.
Treat the average user like cattle, or sheep, if you prefer. Don't give them a choice. Choice is confusing. I like to call these users 12 O'Clocks because they are same people who's VCR's are forever punished to flashing 12:00
Bearded Dragon
It's disguised anti-Red Hatism from those who resent a company making money out of Linux. Mostly ungrateful fucks who don't realise just how much Red Hat's money puts back into the system. There are also a lot of lazy buggers out there who can't be bothered to figure out how to make it work and talk shit about yum and rpm. Add in those who don't seem to realise that Fedora eschews non-Free/possibly patented stuff by default and haven't figured out what a third-party repository is: "I can't play MP3s!" "MP3 is covered by software patents and so its inclusion in the distro is legally dubious. You just need the extra packages from (some repo)." "What's (some repo)? Where do I get that?" "Google is your friend." "Whaaat? That's crap!" "Well fuck off back to Windows, then." It's l33t to bash Red Hat and Fedora (which does look better) and sing the praises of Ubuntu's supposed ease. Lock 'em up in a small room with a clean box and a copy of FreeBSD; then see how l33t they feel after an hour or so.
Another issue, though, is that a lot of apps are prime examples of bad separation of concerns - you'll find tons of dependencies caused by compile time (i.e. via configure) decisions that could trivially have been deferred to load time with trivial plugin infrastructures, giving users much more flexibility.
I'm used to recompiling stuff, but I'd rather not have to much with the packages I install just to disable or enable features, and I'm not alone, which is a key reason why some distros err on the side of enabling almost every option and add a ton of dependencies instead.