No matter how much we might want it, building a home Linux Media Center takes a little elbow grease and a decent how-to. Can’t help with the grease, however here is a decent how-to. Well, it’s a start I guess.

Like a lot of people nowadays, I have a growing collection of digital media. My digital media is stored on a home Linux server. Most of the digital media players available today do not support protocols to connect to a Linux server, which make them unsuitable for my use. I realized the best way to connect my digital media library with my home theatre was to build my own Linux home media center (LHMC).

My LHMC would have to interface with my existing home configuration via a wireless network with WPA security enabled and output to my television’s S-Video or composite inputs, and it would have to connect to my media server via NFS.

For my LHMC hardware I choose the MSI MEGA 180. One of its main attractions was that it is based on a Linux-supported Nvidia chipset and video card. The video card in this model has S-Video and composite outputs. The box has frontal USB and a built-in 6-in-1 media card reader. The MEGA 180 comes as a barebones product. I purchased one in an online auction with an AMD Athlon 2400+ processor, 60GB hard drive, and DVD player for about $350.

I choose to install Ubuntu Linux on the LHMC because, thanks to its Debian roots, Ubuntu is easy to update and manage, and has a wide range of software available. The low maintenance overhead it provides makes the LHMC behave as reliably as an embedded system. And the Ubuntu community offers many solutions and guides in its wiki and forums.

The Ubuntu installation detected all of the MEGA’s hardware correctly. The only thing that was configured incorrectly after the installation was the default screen resolution. To configure the video, Ubuntu needed to be configured to get sources from the universe and multiverse repositories. This allowed for the installation of the binary Nvidia drivers. X.org needed to be set up to output through S-Video so it could display to my television. This process is well documented on Ubuntu’s wiki. The Nvidia driver is also able to output in multiple HD standards…. Source: Linux.com

[tags]linux,ubuntu,media center,msi mega 180,amd athlon[/tags]