Tempted by the Fruit of Another
It looks like Kubuntu is beginning to interest me. I have it running on a partition, and it is solid, fast (yes, it seems faster than Gentoo to me), and usable. More usable than Fedora running KDE. I’m planning on trying to sell it back home for the “web buffer terminal” computer back at the casa.
What keeps me from it on Zach is the Ubuntu/Debian apt roots. Yes, apt is better than rpm. Much better. Yes, rpm is better than simple tgz Slack packages for a desktop system. No, absolutely nothing is better than portage for anything. Portage is teh r0×0r.
What I don’t like about apt repo’s is that they tend to be political (no libdvdcss, no ffmpeg). We’re not talking illegal stuff, we’re talking fringe stuff. Stuff a hip distro like Ubuntu doesn’t want to touch.
But when you’re running a Myth box (which I definitely am now full time… I loves me my DVR rig), this stuff needs to be one “emerge mythtv” away. I don’t want to fight dependencies, and I don’t care what they say on the Fedora forums… third-party repo’s are noooo good, sonny. FC4 taught me that much in a day.
So, Gentoo it is. Gentoo is pretty bleeding edge; amaroK is crashing fairly regularly, and KDE’s screensaver system still doesn’t work for me. This may be my fault, but this crud just works right off the install on Kubuntu. That’s what you’re “buying” when you choose a DE-specific distro. With Gentoo, KDE is just an optional puzzle piece.
I’m surprised Gentoo even works, let alone that it performs at a level among the best of distros (once it’s running!).
Steve is going to be my Kubuntu field tester. He’ll be running Firefox and Gaim on it (nice GTK vs. QT challenge for the KDE-centric distro), along with any other junk he wants to try. We’ll see how it holds up, especially to a media fiend. How long will it take for him to need to decode a Quicktime or WMA file? Will it be able to grab plugins, or will we need a third party repo for ffmpeg, mplayer, and stuff?
Yeah, and the DVR is great. I’ve got episodes of “Dog the Bounty Hunter”, some movies, new episodes of “Family Guy”, and “American Chopper” all piling up as we speak, along with some sports. It is amazing you can do this for free… with a $120 tuner card… at a superior quality. I am very happy.
Of course, my screensaver keeps wanting to either kick on while I’m watching recordings or never kick on ever. This is embarassing and needs to be fixed… out of the box. This is a problem I have fought for a while with Gentoo. Maybe when KDE 3.4.2 is unmasked to -stable. Oh, and why the smack has that not happened yet? I don’t understand Gentoo’s administrative process yet, so I’m just a cantankerous ignoramus on all that.
I’m so just running an “emerge—sync” over SSH, by the way. Not because I’m a high-level sysadmin who has more computers than monitors. I just like my seat right now and I’m not planning to get up. This is sad.
Textdrive is in the process of changing their colo space. They have a cool photo repository up on flikr, which is pretty neat. Even if gilford does go down every now and then, I really like this company. They know their stuff and they do their best. Above all that, I think that their uptime is at the superior level; they’re just honest when something goes wrong. I appreciate that, and I’m trying to learn something about server admin by reading the status blog.
Anyway…long blog, little substance. Just needed to write some before slipping off to bed.