[plug] Turning an out of date PC into a linux home entertainment thingymabob?

[William Kenworthy]

Look up mythtv.  Add youself to the mail list and lurk.  Mythtv on
gentoo lokks less trouble than fedora etc from what I can see.  Its also
helluva complicated ...

There are livecd versions that apparently work well as a teaser.

BillK


On Sun, 2005-10-30 at 19:22 +0800, Ari Finander wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have an Athlon XP 1700+ based system that it does not look like I'm going to be able to sell. So, rather than hook the laptop up to the TV every time I want to watch something on my file server or listen to music stored on the server I thought I'd see if there are any distros built for this sort of purpose. I remember in an Australian PC User mag a few months back about an xbox mod using a linux distro for this sort of thing. Here's what I'm working with:
> Athlon XP 1700+
> 512mb RAM
> brand new Gigabyte motherboard with onboard video and audio
> 20gb and 10gb HDDs
> cd burner
> floppy
> 300W PSU
> 
> So, I figure I'm going to need a networking solution and a video out card. I'm wondering about a video capture card with a remote, but I have no clue about linux support for these. I recall that in the article I mentioned the xbox remote worked with whatever distro they used. I have two PCI wireless cards and a usb wireless g card (coming back from RMA soonish). I'd prefer not to have to string wires into the lounge room, as the video from the server to the laptop via wireless g is just fine at present.
> 
> So, any thoughts? I do not want to spend more than $100 on this (not that I'd be allowed to, anyway *grin*).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Ari
> 
-- 
William Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au>
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