skadus's Journal: WTF?

Linux in general seems to hate me.

A few weeks ago I wanted to try Gentoo on my second computer. I tried a stage1 install, because I figured it would be a good learning experience. When it got to compile tags I just... gave up. I'm too impatient to mess with it, and I was afraid of breaking the install with the wrong tags.

After giving up on Gentoo, I tried Yoper. Of course, the 'easy install' was fine, except for a few partitioning problems. And I was a bit hardheaded about wanting to try ReiserFS. ReiserFS requires LILO. It was going to be a dual-boot system. And I knew nothing about LILO (no, I didn't RTFM. Yes, I'm stupid. But I figured I'd get some help from the installer)... So then I wound up with LILO. Wouldn't give me boot options, couldn't figure out how to add them to LILO once Yoper booted up. So I decided 'no big deal, I'll just reformat, put ext3 on there and replace LILO with GRUB.' Ha. LILO wouldn't go away. And I got a kernel panic every time I tried to boot into Yoper after that because LILO was looking for ReiserFS, which was now ext3. I reformatted with Win2k and declared I would never install Linux again and would stick to LiveCDs.

Except for some reason going from Win2k to botched Linux to botched Linux to Win2k, MediaPortal decided not to run. MediaPortal is like MythTV for Windows. I use my second computer as a media box.

So this weekend I decided to try Linux one last time and install MythTV (Removing Win2k entirely and going single-boot).

Got Debian Network Install, Sarge Pre-RC2 (or whatever the non-stable version is). Apt-Get broke. Off the fucking CD. It kept giving me dependency errors. I manually Apt-Get KDE. I think it broke too, or XFree did, or something. I gave up on it, and got Debian full, CD 1. Installed that. It installed Gnome as part of the Desktop install. Gnome install broke. Off the fucking CD. Debian worked okay, until I went to install MythTV, where dependencies and whatnot prevented it from installing.

That's when I found out about KnoppMyth. It installs a base Debian install with MythTV to HD off a Knoppix disk. Great idea! Except it broke too. I got a string of error messages before it proudly announced that KnoppMyth had installed to HD.

Right now I'm staring at:

GRUB Loading stage1.5.
GRUB Loading, please wait...
Error 15
_

Back to Win2k I go. I'd like to think I'm not a complete idiot, but every time I pick up a Linux disk I begin to question that.

Fuck Linux, Fuck MythTV, Fuck Debian, and Fuck KnoppMyth.