I’ve been running Gentoo on it for forever, but lately I’ve grown tired of dealing with the weekly tree breakage and hassles. I also wanted to attempt a 64 bit OS in the hopes it would gain me enough to play h264-encoded files w/o glitches.
My first attempt was using Ubuntu, but performance wasn’t much better and I was seeing some video tearing. My second attempt was Fedora Core 6. Performance was amazing. MythTV was more responsive and video files played glitch-free. However, ndiswrapper was causing the machine to lockup randomly. This seems to be an issue with the rt73 driver as I saw it on both my installations. My next step was to do a 32 bit install of FC6 and I was shocked to see the same MythTV performance as before. I dunno what magic is being done there, but I likes a whole lot. H264 file seem to be playing a bit better, tho not as smoothly as I’d like.
Getting the rest of my required stack (Hellanzb, Hellahella, etc.) was a snap. There’s no packages for the Hella* stuff, but most of the deps are in extras so installing was a snap. I ended up getting MythWeb installed as part of the ‘Mythtv-Suite’ metapackage so I attempted to run Hellahella behind an apache proxy. Failure was complete there due to hardcoded paths. A bit of Googling later and I found some very helpful instructions on setting it up via mod_python. Those instructions assume you are running apache for Hellahella exclusively (or as a NameVirtualHost). I’m not, so here’s my config:
<location /hella>
SetHandler mod_python
PythonHandler mod_python.wsgi
PythonPath "['/var/www/hellahella/'] + sys.path"
PythonOption wsgi.application startup::app
PythonOption SCRIPT_NAME /hella
</Location>
Alias /stylesheets/ "/var/www/hellahellaMedia/stylesheets/"
Alias /javascripts/ "/var/www/hellahellaMedia/javascripts/"
Alias /images/ "/var/www/hellahellaMedia/images/"
Seems my .htaccess file was borked taking my trac install effectively offline. It’s fixed now for the three people that actually care… 
Well I moved hosting… Again… VPSLand is a decent VPS hosting option, but I was having issues with poor disk I/O performance and the plan just wasn’t cutting it. So now I’m using slicehost. I’m using their entry-level plan, but it comes with 256MB, 10GB storage and 100GB bandwidth for $20/mo. Now this isn’t a hosting company that provides a lot of hand holding, but they are a knowlegeable bunch with a really nice setup. Their management console allows you to do OS reloads, monitor your bandwidth and it has a really cool AJAX remote console.
Unlike VPSLand, slicehost doesn’t provide secondary DNS services (yet) so I had to find another option. Ended up going with EveryDNS.net since it’s free (but donations are accepted). They have four servers spread out over various countries, and it’s damn fast.
I upgraded the Gaim packages in my Edgy repo to the latest (beta 4) release today. Because I stupidly didn’t sync with the upstream Ubuntu packages, you’ll have to remove the gaim-otr plugin and re-install. The plugins I have are gaim-otr, gaim-encryption and gaim-libnotify. I’m prolly gonna go ahead and do a quick Xchat-gnome package cause the new version has a few sweet features like themable icons and irc command tab completion.
Note: I’ve removed all the launchpad and automatic bug reporting patches from all my packages. I don’t want any spurious bug reports going upstream to the Ubuntu folks.
