NAS - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

Posted on July 8th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

To complement my dream of the perfect settop box for my tv, I’ve been looking for a good NAS. Thanks goes to Asbjørn for making excellent Gin Tonics and researching the extensive product selection out there.

I’ve previously held the Synology products close to heart, but their top model the Cube Station CS-406 is two times the price of a (to me) new found product.

My dream NAS now, which I will buy when finances allow is the Thecus YES Box N2100 (Toms network review). It’s got everything I need, and then some. But most important of all, a stylish look according to Asbjørn ;)

The two shops that sell these in Norway are shg.no and Netshop it seems. Both are unknowns to me in internetshopping, so any advice on them is greatly appreciated!

Now, if only there was a NAS with BitTorrent support…

2 comments.

Linux PVR (HTPC) - Here we go again…

Posted on July 8th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: htpc, linux.

Okay, I’m going for this once more… As my girlfriend is on a 10day+ trip to Ireland, I can once again try to get the Hometheatre PC working again.

A little more than a year ago I bought components and stuff from PCUstyr.no to get myself a simple little AMD kit to play with. Back then I tried Mandrake, Debian, KnoppMyth and Suse, and landed first on Debian, and then on Suse for OS.

Both Debian and Suse worked well(Suse in particular), but I never got MythTV to work though, so I swapped to WinXP Home in the end with Team MediaPortal(v 0.2.0.0RC4), and then Nero Premium 7. But after all my effort, I never used the box as a tuner, because Team MediaPortal would just crash when tuning with my Hauppage HVR-1100 card… And the nvidia drivers never got me a good picture to the TV :( I don’t have the patience to fiddle around with all that crap…

But still, if the tuner had worked, the kit wouldn’t have had the functionality I want (MAME, snes, scumm, uae, etc) on top on the tuner and video playback. So now I’m trying again…

So on the recommendation of a friend I tried Mandriva Linux 2006 (Tord, argh….) The distro feels really unpolished compared to Suse 10, the KDE gui is a bit unresponsive and cluttered. For one one of the things that worked under Debian and Suse was that while the system had to think, it would disable the affected parts of the desktop. Not so under Mandriva. Also Mandriva wanted to reboot for the smallest settings change, much like Windows 98…

Also I found that my GeForce FX5200 card wouldn’t work out of the box with the tv, and the drivers were a real pain in the a** to install(no kernel sources available, had to boot into safemode to get a display). Then, after having done all the install prerequisites and attempted install of MythTV; I wasn’t anywhere. Myth compilation just failed :(

So now I’m back to start; knoppMyth? Well no not after two more alternatives are tested out, there is a new live myth distro out there now. I’ll be trying to install My MythDora, a FC4 based distro. My last chance I think, save of trying Ubuntu which is the reference distro for MythTV, which isn’t such a bad idea maybe. As I’ve only heard nice things about Ubuntu so far, but that was also the case with Mandriva…

Then, if all else fails. There is now a new version out of the Team MediaPortal software(Thank you Norton Ghost!). And maybe I can get familiar with its plugin API… Nah, I’ve got enough on my plate with Servibase :)

2 comments.