Why I'm not using only Linux

There are many people blogging about whether Linux is ready for desktop use or not, and whether there is any need at all to use Windows. With this short piece I thought I'd list a few of the reasons why I don't use it exclusively.

1. It's not about OS installation, that's as easy as it can be for a lot of distros
   
2. It's not about any perceived difficulty to install software
3. It's not about not knowing what and how to do something

It's instead a lot about speed. A Linux distro is quicker to install and often has a much wider software selection (or you can compile it yourself). However, there is a lot of preparation required! You've got to read up on stuff, make sure things will work on your distro, possibly that all dependencies are satisfied, that supporting software is configured and running and so on and so forth. On Windows you install your software, sometimes you restart, and that's that.

Some say that the package repositories of many distributions are superior to finding and downloading some unknown installer from the net, but I have to say that just looking at the descriptions there it's impossible to know if you want to install a particular app, you will anyway wish to look at a web page with screen shots, documentation, FAQs and so on. From the actual install perspective the repositories are great, but from an information perspective they suck.

In short, with Windows you work less to get things working, with Linux you have more control, but you can spend aeons setting up stuff to work similarly to a Windows desktop if you're not happy with the defaults.

ivtv tuning problem workaround

Since my last post about problems testing if the ivtv drivers really work by finding a signal I have been thinking how to solve the problem. As the wiki states that you should avoid installing anything like mythtv since that might cause problems instead there should really be a way to scan for signals. I finally gave up and rebooted into my Windows XP installation and used "TuningAssistant.exe", which is part of GBPVR. It asks for your country and whether you receive your channels via air or cable of some sort and then scans the whole frequency band. Luckily it also displays the frequencies where signals are found so I wrote down the information and rebooted back to Linux and could then use

ivtv-tune -f196.250
cat /dev/video0 > test.mpg
ctrl-C

and then watch the clip in xine. Yay, I can see!


Now, on to Mythtv!

Media home developments

I have started to play with getting Mythtv to work. I have the intention of setting up my computer (never to be shut off!) running Slackware 11 as a Mythtv backend, and with VMWare to feed my wife's Windows addiction and for testing, possibly I'll have an older Windows installation for games although I aim to use WINE (in some form) at a later date. The latest version of Mythtv supports UPnP streaming so I finally see a potential for a very nice and integrated solution with my current setup.

But first I need to satisfy the Mythtv requirements, for instance getting the ivtv driver to work. But that's not easy!!! Things seem to work, but I only get static and the way to test seems not very conducive to quickly scanning through the frequencies and finding signals... I just don't see what to do, especially since the wiki discourages installing mythtv or other apps to avoid problems and as far as I can see there's no scanning utility in the ivtv package.

I am on a local cable network so the national channels listed by Teracom are probably not quite corresponding to the channels I receive. So how do people do this?!? I tried installing xawtv because you can change channels using the arrow keys, but no signal (and some say xawtv and ivtv don't mix). On Windows I use GBPVR, which includes a scan tool and there's no difficulty at all. I don't even know what I need to know to use the tools to find the channels - and I can't find the info in the wiki. There's a certain step missing and I guess that I need to continue looking, but I do not know what I'm looking for...

Should I go ahead and install Mythtv? Another tool? Can I otherwise check that the ivtv drivers work? I mean, static is not terribly interesting...

GAAAH!