Operation LIRC

Not much news out of the Al Bundy Box project, formally known as Al. I have a command-line version of Ubuntu Edgy Eft installed. One common sticking point with all my PVR attempts are trying to get LIRC working properly with my ATI RF USB Remote.

A Fresh Attempt

I’m starting a fresh attempt at AL. This time I’m going the MythTV route using Ubuntu. I’ve got a fairly new box to try it on and I’m hoping the choice of hardware is more to Linux’s liking. Athlon 1300mhz, 256 PC133 RAM, 20GB Seagate, ATI Radeon 9000 (this will be the real test) and Creative SB.

Linux Hates Me

After doing a full round bout with the more popular distros in an attempt to find a suitable OS to run my AL project, I’ve come to the conclusion that Linux hates me. For some reason I can’t figure out how to use this thing as a Desktop. As a server I’m at-least somewhat proficient but as a desktop, it wants to kill me through high blood pressure.

Failed source builds send me on endless journys searching for some lib, which also requires some other pack of obscure libs. By the time I actually build something without a dependency failure, I’ve already forgotten what I was trying to build to begin with.

Thank god for rpm and yum. They just do it, Sometimes…

Some message boards recommended trying Fedora 5. That failed. Then I tried Ubuntu. Then Debian. Then OpenSuse. Now I’m back to what i’m most familiar with, Fedora 4.

So far everything is going smoothly. I’ll post pics of the box I’m using for AL as they’re pretty amusing given it’s constructed from just a bunch of junk I had laying around. Pentium II. Gateway. RAM stick here. RAM stick there. Wounded cd drive. You get the point…