PERSONAL 520

SPIRITUAL 416

LDS 312

BOOK OF MORMON 237

SCRIPTURES 154

STUDIO-JOURNEY 129

RELIGION 112

LINUX 79

COMPUTERS 65

LIFE 60

GENERAL CONFERENCE 46

GENTOO 39

MISCELLANEOUS 37

MUSIC 37

PROGRAMMING 33

CARS 29

MICROSOFT 23

FAMILY 23

AUDIO 21

I LOVE MY JOURNAL 18

FUN 15

CHILDREN 12

CURRENT EVENTS 10

NATURE'S WAY 10

VIDEO 9

DRM 9

CONEXM 7

BABBLINGS 7

PROVO CITY CENTER TEMPLE 6

FRIENDS 6

HEROD THE FINK 5

GAMES 5

COMPUTER HARDWARE 5

DRUMS 4

HAND OF GOD 3

ADVERSITY 3

KDENLIVE 3

AUDIO HARDWARE 3

GENERAL INSANITY 3

STUDIO 3

THANKS4GIVING 2

CATS 2

MY JOURNAL 1

POETRY 1

FOREVERGREEN 1

EVERYDAY THOUGHTS 1

GOSPEL 1

PARENTING 1

YOUTH CONFERENCE 1

CHURCH NOTES 1

POLITICS 1

Okay..  So I installed Ubuntu on my brother's computer about 3 weeks ago, and he has been loving it!  Before that, he had been using gentoo with me as his personal admin, which I didn't mind because he rarely needed it, and when he did, it was usually a 10-30 minute fix, no problem.

So, he liked it so much, and from what I could tell, it looked freaking slick.  I installed 9.2, and it seemed to "just work" when I put it on his box.

So, tonight, I decided to try it on my laptop.  My laptop has had gentoo on it since I bought it about 6 months ago, but I haven't had the patience to try to install all the "make my laptop awesome" stuff, and have had problems with my wifi connecting, so....  I thought "What the heck. I'll give ubuntu a shot."

At first blush, it seemed to be fantastic.  My Wifi "just worked", along with all my media buttons, volume control, and all the other funky stuff which usually takes forever to install with gentoo.  I was thinking very good thoughts...

...that is, until I tried to install mythtv.

I have a mythbox server which has been plugging along with relative ease for about 5 years now.  It breaks down about once per year, and causes me a headache now and then, but generally speaking, for not paying anything for a system which takes care of my TV, recordings, videos, music, and photos, I can't see myself complaining anytime soon.

So, anyway.. This mythbox uses gentoo, so it never needs to be "upgraded".  I just upgrade the packages, and it takes care of the rest.

So, I'm thinking that I'll be able to connect to my mythbox with this laptop in no time, and be watching TV on it tonight.

First install of "myth-frontend" from the package manager results in an error.  So does the 2nd and 3rd times.  It seems the error has to do with mysql.

So, I install mysql-server, and it fails the 1st and 2nd time, but seems to work the 3rd time.

I then, install the myth-frontend package, and it goes in without a hitch.

I load it up, give it the appropriate credentials for my gentoo mythbox, and restart (I restart a lot, since I don't know jack about ubuntu.)

It's about this time that I start noticing that my network and CPU usage is spiking on an average of once per second, and I can't invoke myth now without it telling me to "upgrade" because the backend is 26 versions ahead of my laptop's.  When I try to upgrade, it tries to connect and fails.

So, I fiddle with that for about 45 minutes (it's now 1:07am), and I'm getting frustrated.  I keep noticing the network / CPU spikes, and decide to investigate.

Within seconds of loading htop up, I see mythbackend starting, connecting, failing, and stopping once per second.

"What!??!", I think to myself.

"Where in the world did I tell this thing to auto-start??"

Well, I didn't, and I had no idea how to stop it.  Each time mythbackend instance started and tried to connect, it would spawn a new instance, so the thing was unkillable, since it was dead in 1 second anyway.

I fiddled unfruitfully for about 30 more minutes, and decided the only way to stop this thing was to uninstall mythtv.

So I did...  or... I thought I did...

I uninstalled it, rebooted, and it kept connecting.

So I uninstalled mysql, and something called "mythbuntu", which I never installed.

After rebooting 3 times, and still seeing the freaking mythbackend trying to connect, I just about lost it.  I might be a bit naive here, but I just can't seem to wrap my head around what was happening.

How in the world can a program I uninstalled continue to start, and try to connect to my server?

So, while it was still rotating every second, even though the package manager told me it wasn't even installed anymore,  I took matters into my own hands.

I looked up the binary in /usr/bin (which still contained approximately 15 "myth" related commands), and deleted it.

Heh...  Interesting that as soon as I did that, the program stopped running.

So...  With that, I decided Ubuntu still has demons lurking about, and gentoo just plain-old does what you tell it to.

...and I started blogging about it.