Asus Pundit P1-AH
As I mentioned in a previous post, I bought one of these as a second media PC. Recycling bits and pieces I had lying around, it was probably < $500 total.
The design of the Pundit is really slick, all the cables are exactly the right length, it takes one hard drive and an optical drive, and you'd be hard pressed to put it together in an untidy fashion. The case itself is small, about the size of a 360 but deeper. It uses a PCI riser, to provide 2 fullsized PCI cards, ideal for TV tuners. It has decent on board video and audio assuming your using it as a HTPC and not a game machine. The front bezel is pretty cheap looking, but all in all it's pretty much everything I want in a HTPC, with one exception.....
What idiot thought it was a good idea to put the SPDIF connector on the front of the case behind the pop down door. Every other connector you would need for a HTPC is on the back, but to plug it into a reciever I have to leave the flap open and run a cable from the front of the case... AHHH!
Monday, September 04, 2006
Thoughts on Linux
Every couple of years, I install linux and play with it for a while.
The hacker in me likes the idea of an alternative operating system, and I've always been a bit of unix fan.
So I recently purchased a second media PC, and I thought I'd set Myth up on it as a comparison to MCE.
The one thing I always seem to forget when I setup Linux is that you have to plan in advance and buy hardware that has good support. This time was no exception and I bought an Asus P1-AH1, which is relatively new and although the NVidia 6150 was supported, I had all sorts of problems with the audio part, although the latest ALSA drivers do mostly work.
Now it's been a while since I last installed linux, so I looked at a number of different distros. I started with Gentoo, which really is a hackers only apply distro. The nice thing about the distro is that it has excellent documentation and the Wiki has walkthroughs on most interesting problems. The walkthroughs often aren't complete enough to solve the specific issue, but there are usually enough clues in them to allow you to trouble shoot your issue.
I had Gentoo mostly working, but I had some issues with 64 bit binaries, notably the lack of a flash player. So I decided to try a 32 bit install and swapped distros to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is at the other end of the spectrum, install is painless and when your done, you have no source and not even a C compiler installed. Since I was having issues with my audio, and needed to rebuild the latest Alsa drivers, I had to install all the dev related stuff anyway.
Having gotten everything working I was actually of the opinion that Ubuntu is actually more work than Gentoo, if the distro doesn't have binaries that will work for you.
So I reinstalled Gentoo, this time the 32 bit version, everthing is woking, but I now have performance issues with video playback, I'll track them down later....
Overall linux is much as I remember it, I'll still be running windows on my main machine.
Every couple of years, I install linux and play with it for a while.
The hacker in me likes the idea of an alternative operating system, and I've always been a bit of unix fan.
So I recently purchased a second media PC, and I thought I'd set Myth up on it as a comparison to MCE.
The one thing I always seem to forget when I setup Linux is that you have to plan in advance and buy hardware that has good support. This time was no exception and I bought an Asus P1-AH1, which is relatively new and although the NVidia 6150 was supported, I had all sorts of problems with the audio part, although the latest ALSA drivers do mostly work.
Now it's been a while since I last installed linux, so I looked at a number of different distros. I started with Gentoo, which really is a hackers only apply distro. The nice thing about the distro is that it has excellent documentation and the Wiki has walkthroughs on most interesting problems. The walkthroughs often aren't complete enough to solve the specific issue, but there are usually enough clues in them to allow you to trouble shoot your issue.
I had Gentoo mostly working, but I had some issues with 64 bit binaries, notably the lack of a flash player. So I decided to try a 32 bit install and swapped distros to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is at the other end of the spectrum, install is painless and when your done, you have no source and not even a C compiler installed. Since I was having issues with my audio, and needed to rebuild the latest Alsa drivers, I had to install all the dev related stuff anyway.
Having gotten everything working I was actually of the opinion that Ubuntu is actually more work than Gentoo, if the distro doesn't have binaries that will work for you.
So I reinstalled Gentoo, this time the 32 bit version, everthing is woking, but I now have performance issues with video playback, I'll track them down later....
Overall linux is much as I remember it, I'll still be running windows on my main machine.
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