Well, I'm finally getting to putting Linux back on the HTPC, and it seems MediaTomb has come a ways since I first looked it up (it actually has on the fly transcoding now!)...

Only problem is, for some reason the Ubuntu install croaks via svideo so I have to put a monitor on it for the install :sad:...

It'll have to wait till later this weekend at the earliest (as I'm sick this weekend) but we'll see how it goes...

And yeh, it was a pain in the [censored] to backup 1tb of data over the house lol... But luckily I have about 3.5tb of disks over various systems of mine... I really need to eventually make some sort of data server (6x 1.5tb hd's in a raid0 array would be ideal (up to 10 if I went with the ASUS P5Q Premium mobo)) but funds will be lacking for such projects for some time...

Decided to go with Mythbuntu instead of Ubuntu/MediaTomb; have the SVideo output working just fine now (which sucked as I had to find a monitor for the HTPC which meant I had to uninstall it from its location and run around the house with it lol)...

Trying to get all of the filesharing jazz working right now; so it's a give and take operation; should be done by tonight (though I may take a nap at some point lol)

It's been so long since I've used the SVideo output on the HTPC that I forgot I even had it setup on the SDTV lol; I thought the only cable plugged into it was the DSUB to the old HDTV that got busted...

I thought the hard part was the backup all of the data, shut down, move the hw to the back room, install linux and move back; but it seems to be getting Thundar (XFCE's file manager) to work how I assumed it should... Ended up installing Gnome just for Nautilus...

Everything seems to be up and running fine; other than the odd memorycheck loop that the system was preforming; it would just sit and choke once it hit the max ram and then restart the check... Just set the bios to do a quick scan (which was grossly mislabeled, darn you soyo!)

Ok, the partition schema on MythBuntu annoyed me; not to mention I never was a fan of MythTV, so I'm going to be reformatting this week and going with my initial plans of Ubuntu 9.04 with MediaTomb and likely XBMC...

And for note, since someone is bound to ask, the partition schema I don't appreciate is that it puts all of my space for /var/lib vs the entire system, so, should i choose to actually *do* something with the system other than myth I have to think on my toes...

EX:


So, the "home" directory has 8gb space...

Normally, Ubuntu would accredit all of the space to one large partition, which seems messy but works for just about anything:

So, it turns out that current versions of XBMC have their own uPNP server; so I don't really need to mess with MediaTomb (other than the fact that the apt repo evidently has a severely broken binary for MediaTomb) so I've got myself up and running.

I was going to work on getting LIRC working, but I can't for the life of me recall where my Hauppague or FireFly remotes are, eventhough I have the adapters in the machine lol... Plus I don't have my remote programming cable to just download a genaric code online right this second.

So for the time being I've got XBMC auto loading on the ubuntu box and I'm using the web ui as a remote (which I do quite enjoy actually).

It took a bit of time to get Apache configured to use the server as a local dev machine, but it's all up and running now.

I need to look into getting some more memory (I have 512x2+256); the motherboard supports 3gb, so that'd be nice... I'd also like to eventually add another drive to the machine as well.

Well, I couldn't get MediaTomb to work with the XBox (known issues with MediaTomb) and for some reason I couldn't get the built in uPnP server to work that comes with XBMC; so I figured I don't really need media transcoding on that machine, so I threw ushare on it and have it running beautifully...