New Here: MythTV options?

[Chavo27]

New here but am not new to message boards I post at allot of them. For the most part I just use laptops anymore so much easier to be able to be on the computer where I want to be
I have an old PC collecting dust all my OS's are windows I've played with linux in the past. Had red hat about 15years ago and played with a few other distros here and there since then. In the past couple years I've just ran them from LIVE cds never really installed anything.

I had a PC i'm going to use to DVR using mythTV, the turner card I'm getting in the HD-5500. In the last 5 years I've only use suse and ubuntu.

this is all I need to be able to do, web browser, use GIMP, want to be able to burn cd/dvd + encode dvds. Of coarse to able to run that mythTV program.

what distro would you guys recommend?

specs on computer are 4400 AMD 64x2, 1gb ddr (i'm upgrading that as well) audio and video are both on board, I'll be updating the video card as well so I can play back in HD. If you have any advice on what video card would do the job for cheap lmk

[Chavo27]

Maybe this was the wrong section, 76 views and not a single thought? I'd like to get my distro installed tonight this is the only night my wife has off for the next two weeks. it's hard to get anything done when she's not home and my 1year old son is running around messing with everything but his toys.

[oz]

Hello and welcome!

You should probably stick to the distribution that you know best, and make sure that your distro choice has a mythtv package in its repositories. Otherwise, you can go with a distribution that was built specifically for mythtv such as one of those listed here:

Packages - MythTV Official Wiki

[Chavo27]

thanks that's comfortable advice!

[Chavo27]

OZ I wouldn't say I'm really familiar with any of them. Back in 06 I was running a distro I can't remember the name of to save my butt. Anyways they just up and quit working on it..
Need something my wife will be able to navigate around easily as well that's mainly why I stopped with with linux any how. She needed a computer she could use at school and I've had bad experiences trying to set up partitions. So I just kept windows and ran them from LIVE cds it's terrible slow that way..

A few years ago I remember seeing some pretty cool desktops in a video on youtube I can't remember what that was called either..

[oz]

You will probably need to experiment a little to find the right fit for you and the wife.

Linux Mint, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu would be good mainstream distros that you could try. Otherwise, the MythTV specific distros listed in the link above would be good options for testing to find your favorite among them. Lots of distros now have liveCD versions available so you can see what they look like, but they won't perform nearly as well as they do when run from a hard disk install.

Right now, Linux Mint seems to be one of the most popular options for new Linux users.

[atreyu]

I ran MythTV a while back (like Fedora Core 3 back), and it was good enough. I'm sure it is much better now.

Here's another idea: I've never used it, but I always hear good things about XBMC when I'm reading up on DIY Linux media center solutions. I believe it originated as a way to run Linux on an XBox, but has grown to become a mature multimedia solution in is own right. It certainly looks quite nice. If you go to their Downloads page, you will see many installation options, among them of course is Linux. There are many distros that already have XBMC available in their software repos (either official or third party). for example, on my Fedora 16 machine:

[root@localhost ~]$ yum info xbmc
Available Packages
Name        : xbmc
Arch        : i686
Version     : 10.1
Release     : 3.fc15
Size        : 26 M
Repo        : rpmfusion-free
Summary     : Media center
URL         : http://www.xbmc.org/
License     : GPLv2+ and GPLv3+
Description : XBMC media center is a free cross-platform media-player jukebox and
            : entertainment hub.  XBMC can play a spectrum of of multimedia formats,
            : and featuring playlist, audio visualizations, slideshow, and weather
            : forecast functions, together third-party plugins.

and so in my case a quick

yum install xbmc

would get me on my way.

[MASONTX]

Go to distrowatch.com and look at mythbuntu to see if it meets your needs.

[Chavo27]

Installing mint tonight, never heard of it hope I like it
what's the KDE is that for the graphic desktop?

[atreyu]

what's the KDE is that for the graphic desktop?

You got it. alternatives would be Gnome, or XFCE, or Unity, for example.