So, I'm just leaving work and thought I'd phone my wife to see if LambdaTek have delivered the goods. After taking the HDD and RAM in to work in preparation for the 'big build', I was hopeful of a positive response from 'Mrs Foobar59' confirming my package arrival. Unfortunately, much to my surprise (after receiving emails from Lambdatek telling me they'd dispatched my order), my wife informed me there were no parcels for me today. Doh! and double Doh!
I decided to console myself by purchasing some humus, taramasalata, olives and pita bread on the way home for tea (with beer). Just over an hour after leaving work, I'm home. The door opens and Mrs Foobar59's there, smiling. "They delivered it to the wrong address", she informs me as I'm already on my way into the kitchen. And there, on the table, it is. A BOX.
The olives now open (I get pretty hungry on the way home), I've now opened the box to inspect the goodies. Yes, all seems in good order. There's the case, power leads, PCI riser and other attachments inside. That's looking good so far. Now for a peek at the motherboard envelope. There's a static bag with the board inside, SATA and IDE leads - check! Ok, contain yourself, its pretty much all here now. Just the tuner card to go (come on Amazon!).
Anyway, I can at least start to build the majority of this now. I've decided to take the hardware into work and build it after hours with a couple of good colleagues of mine. Firstly, it'll be a major comfort knowing I've got some real expertise on hand and second, they're both interested in what I'm building, so its a winner all around!
The plan is to do the initial hardware build tomorrow (minus the tuner), with a software build the following night. I've come away from work tonight borrowing a book on Ubuntu from another colleague (thanks - you know who you are :-), and have re-read the motherboard product manual in preparation for tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll have the basic unit built with Ubuntu onboard in the next couple of days. I know I could load just Mythbuntu, but I'm after a general purpose Linux box to run not only MythTV backend, but the transcoder and possibly the DLNA media server as well (and who knows what else! - more on this at a later date). For now though, lets just see how far these immediate ambitions get over the next week or so.
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
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Register Hardware: From the lab to the living room
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Hi,
I am very interested in the outcome of all of this work :). I currently run a media center at home based on Freevo (very good package if you want to run it all in one place, and I found it WAY easier to setup than MythTV). I run this on a via SP13000 which is slow and noisy :(
I've seen the new Intel motherboards and I'm interested in 2 main things:
1) How noisy is that fan? Currently the small fan on my via board is the biggest problem, especially on a machine which is always on in the lounge.
2) Can it cope with HD playback? My current system can't, I don't expect it will manage h.264, but I will be interested to see if it does :)
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