Hi This may be a very Very N00b question but i am not sure what i need to install (OS) for what i want to do. I have an old PC that i want to put in the living room. It has 1tb of space. 1) i want it to be able to download files of the net (.isos) 2) be able to access its files from other computers 3) surf the net and look of photos on the TV 4) be able to remotely control it to a certain extent from another computer i am not sure whether i need to install Home Server, Media center + home server or just xP?? I really need your help cheers
probably the best solution for you would be either XP media center or win7, and then install VNC to be able to control it remotely.
This could be done with Ubuntu if you are comfortable with linux. If not, I'd suggest just plain XP or Win7 and using either VNC or remote desktop to control it. As nice as the concept of "Media Center" is, personally I find it bloated. IMHO you'd be far better off running Boxee of XBMC on top of just plain old XP.
Anyone mention a place that won't overheat it, and an easily accessible place so you don't have to rip out your hair when it gets too dusty? Aside from that, anything these other good people are suggesting fit the bill.
I'd heartily second XBMC - provided you don't need a TV tuner in this rig, it'll do everything you need (XBMC doesn't currently support live TV or PVR functions). I've been running it for years on a mod-chipped original Xbox and it does absolutely everything I need. Pretty much every video codec I have used (and I have used a lot) is supported with no additional config. Except for HD - the Xbox isn't powerful enough for HD video decoding (not with a puny 733MHz processor!!), but that's not important to me right now. I've also tried the PC version and it's just as good, if not better, than the Xbox build - the PC version supports HD codecs, providing your hardware can handle it. Plus, it's all open source and has an extensive plugin library (such as Apple movi e trailers, BBC iPlayer if you live in the UK, lyrics plugins, etc) which can be installed from the front-end - no need for messy config files. XP is probably the best OS to run XBMC on, as it has a much smaller footprint than Vista or Win7 - it's a simple job to configure XBMC to run on startup; may even be possible to configure the XBMC exe to run instead of the explorer shell (meaning there's no desktop, start bar, etc.).
XBMC has a Live version now; meaning you can set it up as a boot OS (it's really just XBMC running on a customised Linux kernel and select applications). If you're comfortable with putting ssh or VNC on it then that provides remote-control options as well. I already have a build in mind for it, involving a Pentium dual-core and Zotac 9300 mini-ITX...
Indeed it does, and I've tried it - not bad at all really. Although it wouldn't access the NTFS-formatted drives in the machine I ran it on, so I just stuck with the Windows version for now. You can probably re-build the kernel to include the drivers for the NTFS filesystem if you install it as a boot OS, or just run it on top of another Linux distro. I'm far more comfortable with Windows than Linux however; I could quite easily optimise and secure a WinXP install (or even possibly Vista), but in Linux I'd have no idea where to start! Just a shame XBMC doesn't support TV tuner cards and have PVR/EPG functionality!
