This page is Work In Progress
Here is my initial hardware list. Unfortunaly during the building, the suppling company found out that one of the cards didnt fit in the system. Fit as in, not without bending, breaking or using a hammer. Therefor I shoped around for a new system which can be found on the following page.
Requirements
Lets start with the requirements. I want a nice looking box. My g/f doesnt want a huge machine in the livingroom that looks like a computer and neither of us want a teenager box with lots of leds. So child play stuff like this ugly box from ASUS is a no go area (my god, it looks like it was designed by Philips in the 80ies). Most of all it should be silent, very silent. And since it will be on all the time, powerconsumption should be low. Since I am not that handy with hardware, there should be an option to let it be build.
I want to watch and record shows on the same box, so both frontend and backend combined in one. It would also be nice to have more than one tuner so I could watch one channel and "tape" another or record two channels at once. It also needs to have a big harddisk, not too much memory and all industry standard components. It needs to have internet access as well, preferbly WiFi (at least "b").
I went to mycom, one of the best computer shops in the Netherlands. Good as mycom might be, they are louzy at barebones. They have a list of about a dozen barebone systems, but none of them are in stock or can be sold! Still, they helped me very well.
Hardware
This is the list of stuff I plan to buy
- Case/Motherboard: AOpen XC Cube EZ661-T Black
- A nice design case where one can install Linux on.
- Processor: Intel Celeron D341 Skt775 (265 cache)
- I prefer AMD but the motherboard only support Intel. It is not a blazing fast CPU (though the fastest in my house) but fast enough since all MPEG encoding is offloaded to the TV card.
- Tuner card: Hauppauge Win-TV-PVR 500 MCE
- A very nice card. A bit young, so Linux support is flanky and one needs newer beta drivers. The 150/250 seem to be more mature. However, it has hardware MPEG encoding and has two (!) tunercards and a FM card
- Videocard: ASUS v9520-X/TD, 128 MB
- The main reason for this card is, that is has "Nvidia GeForce FX5200" chipset, very old and well suported by the Linux community. It also has TV-out and DVI-I, good choice.
- Harddisk: WD 320 GB 7200rpm SATA, 8MB
- The PATA and SATA were exact the same price, so having less cables in your barebone (think about cooling! was the reason I choose this SATA. Reading this review, I think I'll choose another brand with maybe less GB but also less noise:
With a sound pressure level of 46.1 dB/A at a distance of 18 millimeters, the Caviar WD2500JD simply does not deliver the quiet idle noise levels that purchasers have come to enjoy with products such as Seagate's Barracudas and Maxtor's latest DiamondMax units.
On the other hard, it has got good reviews from the silentpcreview folks - Memory: Crosair 512 MB DDR400 64MX64
- "512 MB ought to be enough for everyone"
- DVD: ASUS DVR 16X Double layer
- Not much to go by, it does the job and is up to the new speed standards.
- Remote control: Microsoft Remote Control
- according to thinkgeek there should be Linux drivers over at LIRC, but I cant find them overthere. It seems it can be done but not in an easy way. In either case, this model only costs me 29 euro's which is cheap and it looks nice.
- Network: onboard gigabit ethernet NIC
- see below
- Sound: onboard
- n/a
Network
Now most barebones come with on baord wired Ethernet, in my case even Gigabit. My box doesnt have any free slots (a downside of barebones!) yet I dont want to create a wired network in my house. I thought I had two options. I own an excellent Squeezebox (model 1) which is kind of "Wifi to your HiFi". It has Wireless and an onboard 10Mb ethernet NIC. I read once that you could use this box as a bridge, use wireless to connect to the netwiork and extend it wired via the onboard NIC with a crossover cable. However, this feature was added in model 2 and later, so this was not an option for me.
The second option is to buy a new WiFi accespoint and use my current (old "b" one) as an wired extender towards the PVR. Since I still have 10Mb hub's in my computerroom, I could buy a new simple accesspoint with a couple of 100Mb slots. By simple I mean that it doesnt have to do NAT, DHCP, Firewall, ADSL etc. I do that kind of stuff on my own Linux firewall. Simple isnt an option anymore it seems, so I ended up with a nice Accesspoint with 4 100Mb ports and some basic networking stuff I am not going to use.
So I'll get rid of my 10Mb switch and accesspoint in my computerrom and use the new accesspoint as a switch and wireless "b"/"g" network. My old accesspoint will be in the livingroom and deliver fixed ethernet to my PVR. I think this will work.
After