Building my linux-based mediacenter
First of all: I’m writing this post using Qumana, as shown at the footer of this post. Just a try-out that enables me to write thist post in the train.
I’m building a linux-based mediacenter, a so called HTPC. It’s been kinda on my wishlist for a while, but oncoming Christmas makes it possible. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and a few demands crossed my mind:
- It’s going to be online most of the time. Therefore, it should be silent. It would be nice if the system is energy-efficient as well.
- I’m not only going to watch TV on it, but I’m also going to use it as a home server. Therefore, I need a lot of storage.
- I’d like to watch HD movies. Thus, I need power.
- I’m a nerd. I want to use some kind of Linux to power the stuff.
Width these demands in mind, I started filling the shopping cart. Yesterday was happyday: mu order arrived and I could start assembling the stuff. Heres the coices: I (or better: we) found a motherboard with all the good stuff: the Gigabyte GA73PVM-S2H. It’s got an onboard gigabit lan, supports the latest processors, S-ATA and best of all: it offers onboard HDMI out. Should be a winner!
To go width this, I picked the Intel E6750 Core2Duo. Combined with 2GB of Kingston 667 RAM, this should get me a system thats powerfull enough for a while. To power the whole thing up, I picked a Zalman PSU. Nice and quiet. For storage, I choose a Samsung Spinpoint 500Gb S-ATA device. That should give me enough space to try a lot of OS’es.
I didn’t pick a case yet. The Antec Fusion ( or Fusion 2) looked nice, but I’m not sure yet. I’m hooking up the mediacenter on a widescreen TV and I don’t feel like turning that on, just to select another MP3, I need to have some sort of controller-device. So until I picked my case, I’m putting the stuff in an old, standard case.
Putting all the stuff together took me about 30 minutes. Could have been quicker, but ay, it’s all brand new so I’m being carefull. The wires on the Zalman are quite long so they need some tie-wrapping, but for now they’ll just hang. The board is a µATX design, so I’ve got plenty of room to place it.
Wow, what a relieve! This isn’t quiet, this is indeed silent! Really, couldn’t tell if the computer was up or not. And the case was open, because I didn’t know if everything would work out or not. CPU gets a nice temperature of 27º Celcius and stays that way during install. Very, very nice. Next step: installing. There will be more about that in another post.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 10:54 and is filed under Commandline, Debian, HTPC, Hardware, Logs, Mediacenter, Tech, Testing, Unix general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
