I’ve been using Linux on my DBox2 receiver for years now. It worked fine until recently the card stopped working. At least I assume the card is at fault because I tried the same card on two different receivers. But to get any support from the pay tv company I needed to tell them what message was displayed by the original software. I still had the CD with the original software that I backed up when I installed Linux for the first time on my DBox2.

The software worked and I could convince the person on the phone to send me a new card. But the more interesting thing is that I could compare the old original software once again to the software I’ve been using for years now. I had almost forgotten how awfully slow the original software was. It takes minutes to boot and after that is painfully slow to use. It feels like walking through molasses. I attribute this to the system being written in Java that’s run on a PowerPC processor with 66MHz.

At the same time I noticed something else. Neutrino looks really hackish. The original Betanova software looks way more polished and much more appealing to a casual user. I know, Neutrino was developed by a bunch of hackers who wanted better software for themselves but the project has been running for so long now that somebody could have come up with a sleeker looking user interface.