right on bro!

Montez asked for a photo of the setup:

The case is an Apex SQ-328 that I got from PC Club because it was the cheapest thing available and I wanted a case immediately. The included Allied power supply is kinda quiet, but not really. The case itself is not very quiet, but it’s a nice case for the money, and Apex gets points because I called them when I couldn’t figure out how to pop the front bezel off, and somebody at Apex walked me through it.

Case will be replaced with an HTPC case as soon Antec puts out the new NSK2400 or Fusion, and it’ll go into the rack under the TV. (Side rant: Can’t somebody make an HTPC case that fits a microATX board, has a quiet PSU, fits normal height PCI cards, and is less than 6″ tall?)

The wireless keyboard/joystick is an ione Scorpius that I got from Newegg and it works quite nicely with Linux.

The computer is hooked up between the cable box and the TV. Channel changing is done via a serial cable hooked up between the computer and the cable box.

Rest of the specs:

• Athlon XP 2200+ (Thoroughbred core) with Nexus AXP-3200 heatsink
• MSI K7N2GM2-LSR nForce 2 microATX motherboard
• 512MB of Kingston DDR RAM
• Generic cheapo NVIDIA GeForce MX440 64MB fanless AGP video card (output to TV via S-Video)
• Seagate 7200.8 300GB ATA/100 hard disk
• Hauppauge PVR-250 tuner/capture card
• NEC DVD burner (forget what model)

I already had some of this stuff so all I had to do was buy the motherboard, case, memory, keyboard, video card, and serial cable. I think the total expenditure was a little over $240.

Yes, I am a nerd.

So, I have been up and running with my MythTV box (nee Supercomputer) for almost a week now. It’s pretty rad. Supercomputer records TV, has about 120 hours of best-quality recording time, rips DVDs, and can schedule recordings via the Web. It also shows me the weather forecast.

However, Linux (Fedora Core 4) and Myth were a total pain in the ass to install. It was just so…complicated. Everything from Fedora refusing to install the first time, to setting up all the the config files, to downloading 600MB of crap with yum upgrade, to weird error messages, to eventually figuring out that Linux doesn’t have support for wireless networking out of the box, to keep having to su to switch users just to create directories that mythtv could read and write to.

As much as Windows sucks, it does a lot of this a billion times easier. I really want to like Linux (free software, community development, stickin’ it to the man, etc.) but they have a long way to go if they ever hope to gain acceptance on the desktop for the average end user.

But now that it’s done, I guess it’s okay. I wanted to learn Linux, and I did, for the most part.

Next steps:

1. I’m debating whether to go ahead and order the HDTV capture card and try to snag OTA signals.
2. Wait for the Antec NSK2400 case to come out so I can stick Supercomputer in my TV rack.
3. A couple of people have asked me to write up a step-by-step guide for doing this. There are already a few out there, but I might write my own anyway.

Yup.

I have the plague. It’s not some kind of 24-hour plague, either - it’s a full-on, Matthew Hinojosa-in-Vegas-style plague. Started a little over a week ago, got better, and yesterday I just felt totally awful, so I stayed home today.

There are two crappy things about having the plague. The first is, it throws off all of your plans. I haven’t gone running, my brand new gym membership sits unused, and I haven’t seen any of my friends except for Toby in a few weeks. Not to mention work and some other stuff I’m doing.

The second is that the plague makes things neither fun nor enjoyable at all. All I feel like doing is watching TV because it’s a good distraction. Fortunately, I taped Airplane! a couple of days ago, and watching it made me slightly happier.

Fuck you, plague.

In a fit of sheer boredom, I decided I’m going to resurrect the PC-based PVR. Except I’m gonna do it a little different this time - I’m going to set up a MythTV box and run Linux.

Goals for the Courtleigh Super Cool Home Theater PC:

• It has to be super quiet, as it’ll be in my bedroom running 24/7.
• It has to be cheap (no dual-core Athlons).
• It has to be small enough to fit in my TV rack. (Oddly enough, this rules out most of the HTPC cases out there - they’re well over 6″ tall. It also means I have to go micro ATX instead of recycling my old motherboard, which makes this project not cheap anymore, but, well, it’ll be cool if this actually works.)
• Recording analog television from my cable box.
• Automatic transcoding of all recorded shows to an iPod-compatible format. Also, set up an RSS feed of these transcoded shows and have them automatically sent to my iPod.)
• Eventually, I’d like to get a 2nd tuner and record over-the-air HD shows.
• DVD ripping/movie storage.
• Internal Web server so anybody in the house can stream video to their PC.
• I want to see what Linux is all about. (Also, I’m too cheap to buy another Windows license.)
• Private development Web server.

So, I just ordered a bunch of parts, which should be here in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’m gonna start downloading the Fedora Core 4 ISOs, which is what my co-worker recommended. (If any of you other Linux guys recommend a different distro, please drop me a line.) Judging by their size, it’s gonna take a couple of weeks to download them anyway.

The reaction I got from a couple of people at work was, “Yeah, good luck. It’s gonnna be tough to get everything to work properly. But let me know if you get it working so I can build one.” Well, we’ll see.