Linux media centre

[Vae]

I've just got hold of a Transtec senyo 600 which is a tiny and quiet PC. It's got 1Gb of ram, a 40Gb HDD and a 1.7 Ghz Celeron.

I'm half thinking of using it as a media player to connect to my HDTV and run Linux on it except I don't have a clue about Linux or where to start! I realise a 40Gb HDD isn't large but I could plug an external HDD into it for extra storage.

Any suggestions on what I should be thinking about as a Linux distribution, what media type programs should I be looking at and how to network it in with my other windows PCs?

 

[Cadelin]

I would recommend Ubuntu for anyone who hasn't tried linux before. You can download it here. It has good documentation and is reasonably well supported.

 

[Yaka]

ubuntu with XBMC running. you wont get a better media center than that. the atlantis ver is very stable specialy fort ux and osx. win32 ver still hass odd probes here and there

http://xbmc.org/ for the ubuntu/tux ver

and use this skin http://www.aeonproject.com/

 

[wyrd_fish]

xbmc is pretty cool

works really well with an xbox, never tried it on linux, but it'll probably work much the same


some kind of remote might be an idea too

 

[Yaka]

alot of peeps are using the ps3 blue tooth remote with bluetooth dongle. its a "workaround" atm for xbmc but alot of peeps are using as it enables them to hide thier media pcs. theres a guide on the xbmc forums

 

[SheepCow]

I've used Plex on my Mac, which is an XBMC port. It has some cool features such as downloading film info as well as DVD box images, album art, etc.

It's much better if you've got a remote of some kind though, it would be a major pain if you had to go up to it all the time.