Well, I have been having computer chaos over here lately. My main workstation also acts as a Media Center PC or HTPC (Home Theater PC to some) has been acting up lately. I think the recent upgrade to Norton Internet Security along with dumb ass AOL 9.0 Security Edition (for proxy purposes) install are working to kill the machine. I recently put together a small Shuttle XPC Pentium 4 system together to run Windows Media Center Edition 2005 and serve as a Tivo (DVR/PVR) type device for the living room television. However, the Shuttle XPC box, while small and super quiet, is simply not up to the task of capturing and streaming video content. Sooo, I spent a couple of hours yesterday figuring out what the heck I need to do around here to get things working well and to figure out what I need to get all of the machines I will be needing up and running.

I am setting up shop with a good friend and will need a thin-client machine to connect to a to-be-built Windows Small Business Server 2003 machine (which I also have to build on something). I have decided that I am going to try out a little barebones box that comes with a Via CPU from ASUS. The little fellow looks pretty slick and I am going to try and run Ubuntu Linux on it and use RDesktop to remotely log into the SBS2003 machine. The Asus box is only $75 at Newegg and should be here this week. I ordered two and I am planning on running the other one as my dev Linux box. I am going to just swap the Debian Linux drive from my existing Shuttle XPC P4 linux box and hope that it works right out of the gates. If not, I may just run Ubuntu on that little fella as well.

This frees up a P4 box to serve as the Windows Small Business Server 2003 box and I have a 160GB drive coming to install that on. I don’t forsee any problems with the Shuttle box running SBS2003 and serving a few clients simultaneously. It has 1GB of RAMskies in there and hopefully that will be enough.

When all of this is said and done and the dust has settled, I will order up some parts to build a new, AMD 64bit proc based, Media Center box that will probably run the RC1 release of Windows Vista to give it a whirl. This thing will be built in a Chenming 901AD case that can easily handle the 10TB of SATA drive space I am going to put in there. I still have to do some reading on the 64bit AMD processors, but I figure I will give them a whirl on the new box. Once that is built, I will make the old living room MCE 2005 box into my workstation. I am not sure if I am going to go with Ubuntu on that or not. We’ll see how the first one goes. This will then free up the original MCE 2005 box, that serves the bedroom Hitachi Ultravision plasma television, to be rebuilt and have MCE2005 reinstalled.

So, stay tuned for some good old fashioned geekery in the weeks ahead.

tags: htpc, linux, mce, media center edition, media center pc, microsoft, ubuntu