[gentoo-user] Re: fluxbox without xorg-server? How do you start X?

[Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>]

On 2009-06-28, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:03:35 +0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> > But anyone running a MythTV backend will have plenty of disk
>> > space anyway, so an extra few MB of libs that are unused after
>> > initial setup is hardly the end of the world :)  
>> 
>> It still grates on the engineering nerve a bit. ;)
>
> A curses setup program should please the frugal engineers, or would you
> prefer to alter the MySQL table files with a hex editor? ;-)

I usually do one of three things:

 1) Type SQL commands.

 2) Use Mythweb.

 3) Run the setup program so that it displays on a different
    machine.


That last option is clumsy, since it takes forever to start up,
is sluggish once it is running, and I find the UI used by the
setup programs to be obtuse: arrow, and enter keys never do
what I expect them to (and I've been using Myth for 6+ years
now).

I think running the setup programs on the server is the wrong
approach entirely.

If I want a GUI setup program, I'd rather run it on a "normal"
desktop/latpop machine with a decent resolution and a mouse.
They've invented this thing called a "network" that lets a UI
program on one computer talk to a database on another.  It's
pretty cool.

Trying to do a GUI on a machine with a "desktop" that's 500x350
pixels and has no mouse/keyboard is always going to produce
miserable results with widgets ending up completely off screen,
unreadable fonts, and strings clipped to the point of being
unintelligible.  And indeed that's what you get get when you
install MythTv an NTSC display with a normal amount of
overscan.

There was another MySQL table-editor UI that I tried
once-upon-a-time, but it was pretty hard to get up and running,
and not much easier than using 1) and 2).

-- 
Grant