Re: give me "fish" & you feed me for a day..teach me 2 fish & u feed me 4ver!

["Donna." <pudge@niestu.com>]

heh.  I like that subject line.  Here's another request for teaching
assist.

I'm a SCSI/CLI oldtimer who, in recent months, has gotten into video
capture. This is like trying to learn 10 different new languages at
the same time: IDE intrinsics (huge space is cheaper this way), sound
recording and playback, video processing, even the handling of CDs is
new for me.  (What can I say?  Never saw a reason to replace my vinyl,
don'tcha know.  I'm probably the last legacy to pick up a mouse, too.)

Surprisingly enough, I've managed to hook things together and actually
come up with some decent product, but when there's trouble I often
waste a lot of time tracking down a few very wrong paths before
stumbling onto the right one.  Example: when my recording program
starts going insane after behaving itself for days, is it a drive
problem, not enough memory, a glitch in my sound driver, a mismatch in
the configuration of my X server, or because I forgot I was recording
in one window and tried burning a CD in another window? (Error
messages are rarely more enlightening than "Segmentation fault",
and most of the time they come in the form of poor performance.
More than once these past few months I've had to pinch myself to
be sure I haven't fallen into an alternate computing universe.)

I've been through the pertinent HOWTOs, scoured umpteen mailing list
archives, and read faithfully the mailing lists for the primary
capture/encoding utilities I'm using.  But they still don't tell me
things, basic things, I could really use to improve my setup and make
the system sing in harmony.  Such as:

   1. When I can't seem to make hdparm improve the performance
	of my drive, how can I tell if it's a problem with my
	drive, the VIA bug nipping at my posterior, or the nut 
	behind the keyboard?
   2. When somebody else, with a slower CPU, less memory, and/or
	a slower drive than I've got, reports significantly better
	results than I'm able to get (orders of magnitude better), 
	where do I even begin to figure out what I'm doing wrong?
   3. Capturing raw video stream is I/O intensive, while encoding
	the stream is CPU intensive, so theoretically both processes
	should be able to co-exist on the same system; how do I 
	figure out why I can't make it work unless I cheat to 
	slow down the processing task?
   4. How do I begin to parse out everything which broke when
	I upgraded from 2.2.19 to 2.4.[89], with the hope of 
	fixing these so-very-integrated parts so I can stay at 
	2.4.x instead of downgrading back to 2.2.19?  

Stuff like that.  As you can tell from my initial barrage of
questions, I'm currently down the path of suspecting my main problem
is in my drives.  It may not be.  Some days I figure that this is what
it must feel like for normies trying to jump into Debian without even
knowing what Linux is.... I know experience will make troubleshooting
much easier, but I've gotten to the point where, without a better,
more explicit understanding of the basics underneath this house of
cards, the experience I'm collecting now is too superficial to be 
of much use down the road.

Pointers to clue chests will be rewarded with a gratitude so deep it
will be beyond expression, until I reach the point where I can
nostalgically recall these as the "good ol' days".

AdThanksVance.


Donna.
pudge@niestu.com