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Jumping in late in the thread, you should consider that anything you buy should be re-usable if/when you upgrade the motherboard hardware. With that in mind, and the very real prospect that HD capable nvidia ION based packages are about to come over the horizon for about $300US, you should probably limit any purchases at present to hard drives until you know whether you will go ahead (Because down the road lies a dedicated mythbox, with a lot more capability than your present box could ever reach by upgrading, and your present box goes back to being the house file server!)<br>
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Since you won't be doing high def *at present*, your hardware will work with analog (cable). A 32Gig SSD would make a great OS store. Linux Mint is based on Fedora so go with mythdora. That way you will not be lost or stymied by funny little differences.<br>
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Create separate partitions for /home, /var and /, so that you can mess with one without killing data on the others. 'Messing' includes a complete reinstall! You may want to create a separate partition for /usr/local, and install myth to /usr/local/bin stc.<br>
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For various reasons you should symlink the /var/lib/mysql folder to a folder on your /home partition. If you get a runaway error which spews error messages into /var, it will not destroy your mythconverg database if the partition fills completely. The boot errors which you get in that case are sufficiently misleading that you can easily and utterrly destroy any possibility of recovery of anything on the partition. This is especially soul-destroying if you have installed everything, lock stock and barrel to one partition, 'a-la-windows'. So, don't DO THAT!<br>
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The other drive is the big one, or two for storage...Since mythtv lets you add storage transparently, the only limit is your drive controller!<br>
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As noted, the bottleneck is playback. If you are just playing for now, then don't bother with expensive upgrades, until you are sure what you want to do, and where you setup is headed. If you want to add tuners, I would suggest external or PCI based. For North America I consider the hdhomerun the cat's meow for Over-The-Air HD. The PVR-500 is great for analog cable capture. you WILL want 2 tuners for 2 channel capture. I have 4 tuners, 2 HD and 2 analog, and there are at least a couple of people with 6. The max I remember being mentioned is 9 but I may be wrong.<br>
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Geoff<font color="#888888"></font></blockquote><div><br>Thanks for such an information rich reply :) I fear, at this point, some of it is beyond my understanding. I suppose that's part of my wanting to forge ahead, I learn better by seeing and doing than just reading alone. Of course, I will no doubt need to read quite a bit during the whole process. I hope none of you will get too agitated with my forthcoming questions :-P<br>
<br>Some of the hardware is still in flux at the moment, so we'll see. The computer I'm considering using now is my play computer, one I use to try new things out on. It looks like it could be cheaper to buy a new box from state surplus though, so I may go that route instead. We'll see, I still have to do some research on that particular system. <br>
<br>I agree about that nVidia Ion, I'm anxious to see how it turns out. I have heard some initial reports, however, that indicate it may not be as saucy as it appears. I hope they are preemptive, but then all reports at this point are somewhat ahead of their time. I don't mind spending some money now to learn how to work with MythTV and then replace the hardware in the future if the Ion, or something like it. In any case, I would think that those kinds of systems would need a backend...and thus the role for my computer now :) Of course, being green, I may have some false assumptions lurking in that opinion.<br>
<br>Also, small point, but Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. They're working on release 7 now which will be based on Jaunty. My understanding is that Mythbuntu already runs on top of Jaunty.<br><br>Thanks for the feedback everyone!<br>
-- <br></div></div><br><br>,./`*`~Matthew~`*`\.,<br>