-Linux Mint home networking is now done and working beautifully. Had some trouble getting the onboard Via Chrome9 Video working correctly, but I followed the instructions here(compiling it from source) and everything was great. I wanted to use the OpenChrome driver instead of the VESA driver because the OpenChrome one has support for XvMC which accellerates all kinds of video (i.e. Xvid, mpeg4…). Only thing left to do is get a static IP so I can get to my machine from the outside world.

-Royner – I haven’t had much time to work on ironing out any of the kinks before a first release. Hopefully this week will be different. Thinking about Slicehost to host it, as I’ve heard great things about them. I’m also going to try out deprec for deployment, using Nginx instead of Apache. Should be interesting.

Other than thats, its another work week. See ya’ll.

This all started with a couple of great deals I saw on slickdeals.net.

1. Got 5 x 1024mb sticks of DDR2 667 Ram for $7 shipped after rebate.
2. Got a cheap (AM2) mATX ASUS mobo, case, and PSU for $50 shipped.

So, I ordered a Athlon X2 4000+ for $55 while I was at it. This got me a cheap as hell backup pc($112 for a dual core PC w/4 gigs ram and an extra stick for a rainy day). I already had a spare optical drive and an old IDE 40gig hard drive to throw at it. I’m not going to be using it for anything needing 3-d acceleration, so I’m going to stick with the onboard video.

Now, a while back I made a MythTV box consisting of the following:

Core 2 Duo e4300
1024mb ddr2 800mhz
2×320gig harddrives
Nvidia 7300gt
DVDRW
pcHDTV tv tuner (for DVR functionality)
running Linux Mint (didn’t have to install all those codecs)
Old Antec case and an Antec Earthwatts PSU (go green).
NOTE: having a HTPC has changed my life. Just like people who have TiVo will tell you, its awesome. I could never go back. You could put together a decent one for $300-400 if you tried and its wayyy worth it.

It works pretty well, and I know that its pretty high powered for a htpc, but I needed it to handle 1080p x264 rips, which the C2D can. I’ve got about 400 gigs of music, movies, and tv rips on it.

So here is the plan:
The new AMD build will be the front end, mainly running Mythtv and the current pc will be Jen’s computer/the server. Right now, I’ve setup Samba shares for all the media, and set up Firefly (aka mt-daapd) to share all the music as an iTunes share (for my Macbook Pro). I’m also going to use it as a Subversion repository.

So, tomorrow the parts for the AMD build will be here and I’ll have to transplant some parts to it – the TV tuner, possibly the vid card (we’ll have to see how the x2 4000+ handles video.. I hope it can handle HD x264 since the 7300gt won’t help with it. I’ll setup a fresh install of Mit + MythTv and be in configuration heaven for the majority of the night I’m guessing.

Stay tuned.

Thats as far as I got tonight. My crappy D-Link router was giving me trouble so I didn’t get as far as I wanted. Wish DD-Wrt would run on it.