Another day of Windows de-installation

Wooohh, I love that sentence…
.

This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my
Intel-Mac.Due to the lack of virtualization support in the current Mac OS X
release, rumors say it might be introduced in the next major
release of Mac OS Leopard, the only way to run another operating
system simlutanously is by using a virtual machine emulation
software.
For example: QEMU or its Mac pendant Q

Q is optimized for speed on Mac hardware and already available as a
universal binary, which means that it will provide near native
performance for x86-architecture based operating systems like
Windows, or a linux distribution running beside Mac OS, e.g. Gentoo
Linux as it doesn’t need to translate all the
CPU operations to a foreign architecture.

Q makes everything amazingly easy. Just download a OS-system image
from http://free.oszoo.org or any usual installer-cd.iso, setup a
harddisk-image by entering the amount of MBytes and boot.

I tried Gentoo 2006 and ReactOS (a WinNT-Clone) and both work
perfectly and quiet fast besides Mac OS.

But right after installing the MacOS provided X11-package, I asked
myself, why I would need another OS.
I found no reason.
Virtual machines shutdown.
Mac OS is simply great.

I’m not missing a single application that I had used before on
win/linux, and thanks to Apples Xcode (IDE) I will write my own
application if I’ll feel that I would miss something.

Apple, Intel,
good job.

Finally I decided to delete all the
Fedora trash from my epia.Since I found some good howto’s for debian I gave Debian
Sarge
a chance which installed fairly easy, and most important,
rather
minimalistic. But again it lacks the newest kernel features
that will support my newer DVB-T card Terratec Cinergy 1400,
as well as framebuffer-support for the Epia M10000.

Fortunately, after some frickling, I managed to backport the
DVB
stuff into the older “newest” debian development kernel,
and also the via-frambuffer driver.

A bigger problem was the DRM/DRI drivers which refused to
compile
for my debian kernel, with some strange missing symbol
errors…
Anyway Mythtv is now up and running, although without
hardware
mpeg accelleration.
Menuloading is a real pain in the ass, and also channel
switching,
but timeshifting and the EPG works great anyway…

On the internet I found an article on “KnoppMyth” which
promised
to work “out of the box(from CD)” on a Epia system…
waahhh….

After a short try, I realized that it works also without
accelleration
and further needs a huge desktop installation….
Not to mention the missing support for my DVB card, but OK.

I really wonder that after those many years of DVB
introduction
it’s still impossible to buy a settopbox which has all
features
built in.

For example Pinnacle’s Showcenter (a streaming-client) can be
combined
with a streaming server PC which has a PCTV card (analogue or
DVB)
so it is possible to programm it like a VCR. But the only way to
see
Live-TV is to programm a channel via Showcenter, wait for the
recording
to start and then pickup the file inside the videolist and play
it.

That’s simply bullshit….