Why can't every distro install work like Red Hat?

After all my problems with Debian and Gentoo and their derivatives, I pop in my old RH9 discs and it just works.

Got apt-get, had a little fun with that, though then I decided to upgade to Fedora 3 Test 3. Bad idea.

So now I'm re-installing RH9. Possibly going to download Fedora 2 and upgrade to that. But after wasting a DVD-R on Fedora 3 I'm probably going to look into other options.

MythTV's not working, either. But I'm sure it's just a step I'm missing.

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.

W00t.

Not the prettiest thing going, but It was my first time [strike]stealing[/strike] writing PHP code and setting up PHP on my Apache server.

Bad side is, my cool XML idea doesn't work because all the individual elements have to be inside one master element. Appending lines won't work if I have to insert them before the last line.

So I'm going to have to figure out what other format to use so I can actually read what I put in. And password protect the input page so I don't have to worry about people finding it and trashing it.

Eh. Friend of mine made me take this one...

Your Results:

# 1. Mainline - Liberal Christian Protestants (100%)
# 2. Liberal Quakers (98%)
# 3. Unitarian Universalism (89%)
# 4. Bahá'í Faith (82%)
# 5. Reform Judaism (82%)
# 6. New Age (78%)
# 7. Secular Humanism (78%)
# 8. Neo-Pagan (72%)
# 9. Mahayana Buddhism (69%)
# 10. Taoism (67%)
# 11. Orthodox Quaker (66%)
# 12. Non-theist (64%)
# 13. Theravada Buddhism (64%)
# 14. Sikhism (62%)
# 15. Orthodox Judaism (61%)
# 16. Islam (52%)
# 17. New Thought (48%)
# 18. Jainism (47%)
# 19. Mainline - Conservative Christian Protestant (45%)
# 20. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (40%)
# 21. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (39%)
# 22. Hinduism (31%)
# 23. Scientology (31%)
# 24. Seventh Day Adventist (30%)
# 25. Eastern Orthodox (28%)
# 26. Roman Catholic (28%)
# 27. Jehovah's Witness (13%)

A couple questions rendered wrong in Firefox and repeated (and unclickable), so my results may have been skewed. Not sure what my 100% means, but I vaguely remember Liberal Quakers being kinda cool and laid-back. My kind of religion. :p

Your Results:

1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%)
2. Badnarik, Michael - Libertarian (74%)
3. Bush, President George W. - Republican (58%)
4. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (43%)
5. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (41%)
6. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (39%)
7. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (37%)
8. Cobb, David - Green Party (36%)
9. Nader, Ralph - Independent (36%)
10. Lieberman, Senator Joe, CT - Democrat (36%)
11. Kucinich, Rep. Dennis, OH - Democrat (35%)
12. Peroutka, Michael - Constitution Party (35%)
13. Gephardt, Rep. Dick, MO - Democrat (32%)
14. LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. - Democrat (31%)
15. Brown, Walt - Socialist Party (30%)
16. Clark, Retired General Wesley K., AR - Democrat (27%)
17. Hagelin, Dr. John - Natural Law (20%)
18. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol, IL - Democrat (19%)

The questions were a little skewed. I mean, my definition of 'racial equality' is probably not the same as the NAACP's, and stuff. And nothing about stem cells and such.

Not to mention if you've been 'programmed' to like somebody, it's easy to skew the results. But then, it's made for undecideds, I guess.

(EDIT: Re-graded the test to include all the excluded people... Al Sharpton? Howard Dean? Above Kerry? Yeesh... :p )

Had an idea recently... Basically, I'd make a simple XML database to replace wishlists online.

Instead of having like 15 wishlists on 15 different sites, some of which die after awhile or are linked to a specific computer, the XML file would have a few simple classifications, and a URL to the item online. The XML would be hosted online... well... somewhere... and I could format it so it's not too ugly.

Extras:

• PHP or ASP or some kind of web code to append the XML file with new entries.
• Code like at the List of Linux Live CDs to filter/sort the list. Like, say I want to only show the Gamecube games listed. Click. Boom. Done.

Now if only I knew how to implement such a thing. :p