Linux on netbooks

[Jarod Wilson]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 10:29 AM, David Kramer <david-8uUts6sDVDvs2Lz0fTdYFQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Wed, January 20, 2010 10:18 am, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> As for MythTV, yes, you can run mythfrontend on them. For most, HDTV
>> playback is out of the question, unless you have an ION-based netbook
>> or a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder card and the yet-to-be-written MythTV
>> support for it. Standard def stuff will play fine though.
>
> I'm still slumming with SD on my mythbackend.  (1)My SD cable box is YEARS
> old, while the HD DVR cable box in the house dies every few months (2) I
> already have 1.5TB.  If I went HD I would need more than twice that.
>
> I was mostly concerned with a video card with a chipset that can use the
> proprietary drivers mythfrontend needs to work.  I've never been able to
> get a front end working without the proprietary nvidia driver.

Hm. I've had no problems running mythfrontend with Intel graphics,
which is what most netbooks are going to have (Intel gma950 on the AAO
I had).

>> But what someone else said: battery life is probably going to suck.
>> Unless you're running the bundled Linux OS that's been tweaked to heck
>> with non-upstream kernel patches, wacky userspace processes twiddling
>> bits in /proc and /sys, etc. (This was the case with my AAO's bundled
>> Linux-based install vs. a Fedora install).
>
> Does that include Ubuntu netbook remix?

Not sure. Probably somewhere in the middle -- I'm assuming they've
probably sucked in as many netbook tweaks as possible from the various
stock netbook distros, plus, I think UNR *is* the stock Linux on some
netbooks. However, I doubt their kernel is quite as tweaked as the one
that shipped on the AAO, since that kernel was specifically for this
machine, vs. one that can run on multiple different machines. Not sure
if the UNR kernel is one and the same as the main Ubuntu kernel, or if
they ship it with a modified kernel build... (Could be the lpia arch
kernel is configured/patched differently...)

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org