[ILUG] Mini-itx

[Ben]

I have a mini-itx box (M10000 - nemh, Travalia 134 case) that will turn 
into a media centre / house server once I stop playing with it and leave 
a distro on it for more than 3 days!

At the moment I am running Suse 9.1 pro, seems to work quite straight 
out of the box, apart from xine locking KDE up and getting MPEG hadrware 
decoding working. TBH as a media platform if you are just using it for 
music and pictures it is grand, anything to do with the DVD end is a bit 
of a pain in the arse, nothing that would bother a techie, but just 
enough to stop it being used by people who just want it to work without 
caring about what lies beneath. e.g getting DVD menus working (yes I 
know about Ogle, just try and get it working every time without having 
to ssh in from a palmtop and kill -9 stuff), not a problem for a film 
but try explaining mplayer to your wife when she just wants to watch 
thwe last half of episode 4 of the West Wing without watching the other 
3 first!. I have also had problems getting USB wireless working and 
external remote control. That being said I am still playing with Frevo, 
Mythtv and some of the car PC front ends (most promising). but my gut 
feeling at the moment is that if you want a DVD playing media appliance 
that is usable by the non *nix among us then it would probably have to 
be M$. There are some nice projects that should change this in the 
pipeline, including a gentoo based epia specific version of linux.

For an under the stairs file / print / music server it would be ideal 
but probably less cost effective than a silenced desktop as the main 
benefit of a mini-itx box is space saving and geek chique!




.





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