Linux discussion

[greg]

Okay, so here we go. I once had an old laptop that I had installed Fedora on. It was fun to tinker with Linux and learn about it, but that laptop was stolen when my house was broken into in 2010 in America. The good thing is that the insurance money I got for that laptop theft was more than that old laptop was worth, since they went by original purchase value. So at least I got a new laptop out it.

So anyhow, let's talk Linux. If I was to build a media viewing box for my TV, what's the best Linux flavor?

[Heero]

Ubuntu is generally the most friendly, but if you worked with another flavor previously then I assume the complications of using Linux vs. Win(whatever) is not a problem. One of my friends uses Mint and I've considered switching if only because I don't like where they've taken interface dev on Ubuntu. Anyway, no real suggestions, but I currently use the latest Ubuntu and have no serious issues playing many media formats or watch CrunchyRoll or Hulu.

[yusaku]

Ubuntu is by far the easiest version of linux I have ever used. I remember starting an install and came back an hour later to find the install had finished. It was about eight years ago I did an ubuntu install. My favorite brand of Linux was Berry Linux.http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=berry. This distro has both English and Japanese support. I found this distro very fast. I was disappointed I could not install it as a dual boot option for my computer. Yet, I also have the Solaris operating system that has copy protection to avoid data loss. I think I will give my old Solaris machines a good look over tomorrow because they have been doing absolutely nothing. Anyone got any ideas for uses for four legacy Sun servers sitting in a 42U cabinet?

[Drew_Sutton]

Woooo~ Linux~. And I say that as one of the guys who seconded the motion of starting the thread.

I am still a relative newbie to it; or, at least, I feel that way. I have a lot of colleagues and friends who have been using it for at least 10 years, so my paltry 7 years makes me feel kinda small. I am also relatively distro-agnostic (I'll try anything once!), so I still experiment with different distributions if it is something neat or a re-vamped toolkit to fit a need or curiosity. At home, I prefer Debian-based distributions because of the stability combined with a little bit of modification required for multimedia stuff. At work though, if you talk to lots of industry standard folks, there's a huge preference for Red Hat-based OS. For my home machines, I use the following:

Home Office - Debian Stable
Personal Laptop - Xubuntu (need to migrate it to the latest LTS)
Distros I am experimenting with - KaliLinux, CrunchPwn (#pwn!)

Distros I have used at home in the past:
Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat
SuSE/openSUSE
Kubuntu
CrunchBang (#!)
... and there's got to be a few more i am forgetting.

If I was to build a media viewing box for my TV, what's the best Linux flavor?

Loaded question. If you want things to work almost immediately out of the box, then something like Linux Mint or a version of Ubuntu is probably one of the best places to start. I recommend those because of Ubuntu's reputation of ease of use, especially for someone who is still new or learning Linux, and most importantly, that they include a lot of the most common-but-proprietary media codec/plugins/whatever, like Flash. Video support, through either a native player or third party like VLC, is pretty good, regardless of distribution. When it comes to whether or not I want to "fix" things or not after work/on a weekend, I would lean towards these. There is another Ubuntu-based distribution, called MediBuntu or something like that - which was one of the original Media PC Linux distributions. I don't know if it's still actively developed or anything like that but could be a viable option as well.

That said, Linux can be all of what you make out of it. I have complained about how long it took for me to configure an old SuSE box for multimedia playback and after a few months, something was updated and borked it. I just didn't have the passion to figure out the chain (what broke it, how to fix it, etc. etc. etc.). That's no knock against SuSE - it would be a top contender for a server environment any day of the week - but it just wasn't right for my needs. I have a friend, who guided me along getting SuSE configured for multimedia and as far as I recall, still swears by it and never ran into the issues I had.

The part I get hung up on when it comes to using a Linux media server is the hardware. I am still paranoid about hardware support for non-tried-and-true peripheral components. However, talking with a friend of mine the other weekend, stuff like having a remote control could be bypassed in favor of a wireless mouse with the RF piece in the computer is done via USB instead of putting faith into a Bluetooth remote and picking a distribution with janky Bluetooth support.

Yet, I also have the Solaris operating system that has copy protection to avoid data loss. I think I will give my old Solaris machines a good look over tomorrow because they have been doing absolutely nothing. Anyone got any ideas for uses for four legacy Sun servers sitting in a 42U cabinet?

Depends on how legacy Solaris is? Are the servers using SPARC processors or are they x86 compatible chips?

My initial reaction is web server and linked database but having no idea what the actual hardware layout is, I don't know if that really makes any sense. My exposure to Solaris is extremely limited. I've only known it to be used in either webhosting or finance industries and even then, it was legacy when I got there.

[Drew_Sutton]

I figured that if there's a month between my last post in the thread, we can forgive double-posting, right? 許して下さい.

Something came up and I'm thinking about going back to openSUSE. The laptop I have been meaning to load up Xubuntu's latest LTS on is now the target of upgrade. The plan is that I am going to tinker with multimedia support and using multiple monitors for presentation and get openSUSE set up for full time use. If I can do that, I will get rid of the Windows partition on here that I have been using as a panelist crutch for several years.

The last version of openSUSE I used was 11.1 back about 5 years ago. Wrong repositories updating caused multimedia to bork itself and I didn't have the time or passion to fix it. From everything I have been reading about the latest version, support has become easier to get, even though a lot of the more basic codecs don't ship out of the box due to the project's commitment to being mostly free software.

[greg]

I figured that if there's a month between my last post in the thread, we can forgive double-posting, right? 許して下さい.

Heck, a day or even several hours is fine in between postings in my book!

My desktop had a blown power supply. It had lasted me nearly 9 years and survived the move to Japan, in which only it, my hard drives, and the physical tower survived and I had to replace everything else (motherboard, cpu, ram, etc). I saw some real small mini-towers and got to thinking again of someday building an Unbutu fansub server to plug directly into my TV...

[Drew_Sutton]

Heck, a day or even several hours is fine in between postings in my book!

My desktop had a blown power supply. It had lasted me nearly 9 years and survived the move to Japan, in which only it, my hard drives, and the physical tower survived and I had to replace everything else (motherboard, cpu, ram, etc). I saw some real small mini-towers and got to thinking again of someday building an Unbutu fansub server to plug directly into my TV...

That's a really long time! I blow up all of those things every day and they're not even a third as old!

I keep coming back to the media center, too. I have a little bit of bonus money I am sitting on, maybe I should just break down and buy the parts I need, build it up and just keep in mind I might have to cycle through a couple of OS versions before it's "perfect".

The install of openSUSE is going well - since they have a nonOSS repo option built straight in from the install disk, mp3 works out of the box. I haven't attempted an video direct off the hard drive yet. I'm still having trouble getting YouTube and other streaming video to load, despite Flash being installed (possibly pending a reboot). I did a bunch of bulk updates this morning, too, so that might be part of it. I've also spent a lot of time replacing stock software with variants that I prefer; since I prefer the XFCE Window and Desktop Systems, I installed that but a lot of the stock software that comes with it is GNOME based. So I've been replacing stuff like Brasero CD Burner with K3B and Transmission torrent client with KTorrent. Also got rid of Firefox and installed Chromium.

Once I have video tested and adjusted at the appropriate levels, I am going to attempt output to the TV (via VGA) and managing multiple monitors/outputs and hopefully will be able to craft a general enough X11 config file that I can hook up to whatever TV or projector for presentations/panels.