Hardware topics

LXF did an interesting article on building a cheap quiet mediaPC, replacing the normal HDD with a compact flash card plugged into a CF to IDE converter, which looked pretty cool.

Also, depending on your budget, I'd really like to see you play with the Hauppauge MediaMVP - a little set-top box originally designed for putting your Music, Videos and Pictures (MVP) on your TV, but there is a Linux version of the firmware that will do MythTV (and other things) - see http://www.mvpmc.org/. You can pickup a MediaMVP for about £30 on ebay...

(There are a few really big advantages to this box:
1. It's a tiny little box, which makes no noise
2. It has a proper remote control
3. It's specifically designed to plug into your TV
4. It boots its firmware over the network, not internally, so "flashing" the firmware just means placing a different file on the network with the appropriate filename)

sweet, simple, effective. a how to on running DD-WRT on a linksys router. It is linux, just specialized to run on linksys routers. here's what you need.

***DISCLAIMER***DISCLAIMER***
it is possible to "Brick" your router (messing it up for good) by doing this. it's a very slim chance, but a chance none the less.

a Tutorial *I can supply this*
a linksys wrt-54g *v. 1.0 to v. 8.2* ((v. 7 not supported))
a tftp program.
and the proper flash files found at DD-WRT.com = http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php

BTW, it runs on LOTS of other routers as well, consult the list on dd-wrt.com for all the compatible models.

The plus side of this is that a) you get more functionality, so it's basically more bang for your buck in a router b)it runs linux!