What’s happening?
It seems that it’s been a while since I last updated my blog. At that time I was looking at running the various Mythtv-based linux distrobutions. Among the distrobutions that I had mentioned are Mythdora, Mythbuntu and LinHES. At the time, I had tested Mythdora. Well, I recently found myself with a bit of free time so I decided to load up Mythbuntu 10.04. I have to say that if you’re new to Linux and want to take Mythtv for a test drive, it doesn’t get much easier. It was litterally a matter of answering a couple of questions during installation to determine which pieces you want installed (frontend, backend, etc) and then a regular Mythtv configuration from there.
Looking at these newer distrobutions made me start thinking about upgrading my production Mythtv network. It is currently running version 0.21 and Mythtv is up to 0.23. So this got me thinking, what distrobution would be best for a dedicated Mythtv backend? The reason that I’m in this situation is because my current system is based on Fedora Core 8. Mythtv was installed from packages provided by atrpms.net. Unfortunately, this repository only supports the three most recent versions of Fedora and Redhat. Fedora is now up to 13, with Fedora 14 coming soon I’m sure. This means that in order to get support for my current Mythtv setup I would first have to update the OS from Fedora 8 to Fedora 13. With a major jump like this I just know that I’m asking for trouble.
One option would be to backup the Mythtv database, wipe the system clean and start with a fresh installation of Fedora 13. However, I don’t want to find myself in this situation again in a couple of years. So I thought that I would throw this out to the community: What Linux distrobution would you recommend for a backend system? I’d like to be able to keep Mythtv up-to-date without having to update the OS itself every six months or so. Whenever I do an upgrade it inevitebly causes something to break, which brings down WAF for a couple of days.
So what should I do? Leave a comment!