I realize that I may be asking a completey stupid questions but as a Noob I can't even determine that much...

How hard would it be to buy an out-of-the-box Emachine and install MythTV on it?

I'm living in Japan and would like to get a new Media Center computer to play and DL torrents with. Local Japanese computers I have been told may have driver issues. The Emachines sold here are from Costco and as such I would hope they are similar in hardware spec to those sold in the USA. The only difference being that they insall Japaese Windows on them. I'd like to wipe one and throw MythTV on it but I have never install or run LINUX on anything and have a great fear of all night driver configuration sessions. Any advice?

It seems the Emachines run either:

NVIDIA® GeForce® 6100
or
ATI® Radeon® X300-based integrated graphics

Hi,

I like the e-machine with KnoppMyth as it is the only system that I have seen that will mix audio. By that I mean if I am playing tunes or watching tv/video & at the top of the hour saytime makes the scheduled hour annoucement, it works and I hear both. No dsp busy error Moden day coo coo clock....

I built one for my son ~6 months ago and the only issue I had was setting the cmos correctly so the network card worked. I used ubuntu to do the resize & partitions (he dual boots as sometimes needs windows) Small trick to fixing lilo and then good to go.

His was an ide drive and I put in an FX5200.

I have also put it on several older e-machines, used savage for the video driver using a pvr-350 worked fine.

Hope that gives you an insite.
Mike

well thats great to hear....

I'm a total newbie to all of this...would you mind writing a brief overview of what you had to do? Some of the comments in your reply went slighly over my head...[/quote]

Hi barnis,

Sorry about throwing a lot of information... may not all have been connected well either. Ideally, if you have a spare drive or a drive that you can just over write and not look back, use that for a test setup. anything 13gig and > is cool.

Then download the R5C7 and do an auto install and see what shakes loose. Even if you do not have a tuner card, go through all the steps pretending that you have the _____ card that you may like to get in the future. Select the haupauge 16 and c for a remote (usb version I think) You can always change it if needed.

Then let us know what does / doesn't work and we can go from there. Just tell what you see and what happens. If you don't put the toe in the water, you will never know if it is warm or cold.

Just as a starting point in the first setup after the reboot, I always make a Video source and edit it for channel freq 1 & also a RF source and edit a channel freq of 3. You will understand when you get there I think.

Have fun!
Mike