I've been working on a little project on and off for the last few weeks - a Linux Media Centre for the living room using an incredibly old machine. I might go into details in a later post, but these are a few interesting points so far.
* I started out trying Ubuntu Studio. Unfortunately it just didn't work out for me - I keep trying Ubuntu and being frustrated by little things. In this case it was the network manager that gave me the shits. It is a very nice collection of packages though - I would definitely recommend this release to an Ubuntu fan with similar aspirations.
* So I switched back to my old faithful, Mandriva. Ahh, home sweet home.
* HASSLE #1. Never buy a wireless card for Linux without checking compatibility! I bought a cheap Buffalo usb wireless adaptor and spend days going between forums trying to get it to work. Eventually I gave up and got a good little D-Link adaptor that is working fine via ndswrapper.
* It is a pretty old machine - 512MB RAM and 2.6 MHz CPU. This seems to be too much for Xine movie playback and brings even 240p youtube videos to their knees. YT compatibility isn't a big deal for me, but DVD playback is. Currently I've switched the window manager to XFCE and am using Mplayer, which seems to be handling DVDs much better. Still no DVD menu support though, so need to hit up the old Google for that.
* Software Win: Banshee. It is beautiful, efficient, captures net radio and album art with ease and has a much cleaner library manager than the current Amaroke. Very happy!
Finding this a fun project and learning a fair bit - particularly about the CLI network tools, thanks to Ubuntu Studio and Buffalo issues :)
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