KNOPPMYTH AS MEDIA CENTRE with NO TV/TUNER CARD
VIA EPIA Nehemiah M10000
512MB branded PC3200 RAM (made sure of that, after a working generic chip didn't allow it to boot. The MB only goes up to 166 I think, anyway)
40GB Maxtor ... super-quiet version
...all inside the Morex Cubid 2699V case - seems a lot of people bought this two years ago
ATI Sapphire Remote Bob (model 5000022000, this was a little problematic)
Knoppmyth R530.2
No optical drives. There's space for laptop-types but not yet. This is for watching things over the network. We have a consumer DVD recorder so DVDs can be watched through that. Incidentally that's where I dump broadcast TV - there's so little of worth that it didn't justify building in the TV aspect. You can "get hold" of anything you miss, and watch it on Myth. Plus I have cable, so it didn't make sense. However having tried Freevo & Geexbox, I'm finding that Knoppmyth is the easiest way to get a solid living-room video player up and running. And that includes Debian & myth debs. Well done guys, keep up the good work.
The tweaks I had to make
* Fairly obviously, had to set DPMS to false in XF86Config-4, as per the wiki (4-bit colour after installation). After reading the howto
here, I ended up replacing the whole file with something new.
* LIRC - had to tweak this after using the supplied atiusb conf. The codes for the 22000 seem to be wrong. Good response after combining the 5000022000 parameter section and the 5000023600 codes in a new conf (and moving the receiver...). Using the supplied confs, I could only get it working by using the 23600 file - the wrong one. A useful addition in lircrc was mapping DVD_ROOTMENU = osd for mplayer (enables time elapsed)
Had some trouble getting xmame to work, as others do, but that is definitely down to inappropriate settings from the database. change mamesettings in mythconverg to fix. During one install (eventually erased & replaced) I had to use the version-kludge script too, but never before or since.