On Mon, March 19, 2007 1:16 pm, Brett Davidson wrote: > On Mon, March 19, 2007 9:35 am, Brett Davidson wrote: >> What're the benefits of Sabayon over other distros? >> No flame wars please - just interested in what it claims about itself >> but am too busy at present to look and also thought others might like > to >> know. >> >> Brett. >> >> > > Its a precompiled gentoo system with good support for the latest X > frills > like AIGLX, Beryl etc. It is installable to the hard drive, you may or > may > not like the theme, its all orange and black. It is runnable as a live > dvd > if you want to try it out. > > Advantages: all the support etc of gentoo. All the flexibility of > gentoo. > Precompiled for quick install. Lots of apps. > > Disadvantages: all the flexibility of gentoo. > > -- > Nick Rout > > LOL! OK - I understand now! I might give it a whirl in May when I get > back from holiday. (Two weeks to go!) > > I want an eyecandy distro for my next home project of a home media > server. The box needs to be quiet as it'll be in the lounge. > Haven't decided yet if I make that box the media server itself or have > it as a front-end connecting to a mediaserver box sitting in the > computer room. > > The main constraint is that "She who must be obeyed's" fashion sense > dictates that the lounge box be pretty or else hidden behind the TV so I > will need a wireless controller of some sort. > I could make one (would need to be rf) but it would be easier to use an > existing controller - evan a game one would suffice if it looked good > enough. (Wife Constraint again). > > Wife likes the idea of a Mac-mini for looks and ease (also comes with a > wireless controller) but the inbuilt software only plays proprietary > media. No RAID either so this could only be a front end. > > VLC (runs on almost any OS and plays almost anything) is not pretty but > works well. > > MediaPortal is pretty for an O/S solution but only works on MS-Windows > OS's. :-( Works with almost any form of RF controller though, including > game ones. > > Tversity requires an additional front-end to be useful and appears to be > optimised for embedded front-end systems. > > The Unreal Server is somewhat limited in abilities. > > Firefly is a bit too immature as yet. > > Anyone else got some options/ideas? > > Brett. > >
All your media server has to do is export useful directories via smb or nfs. Have the video files u want in the exported folders. I have three computers with multimedia files, all on the LAN. One is also the mythtv machine (see below). For the client, which does the watching, you could look at: geexbox (I have this on one machine in the second lounge, it runs off a CD or CF or hard drive. It is about 15MB, including the kernel and mplayer, and the menuing business.) mythtv (you don't need to activate the TV watching bit) - this is in my main lounge. freevo - similar to mythtv in concept, it is now allied to geexbox and the next version of geexbox will be based on freevo. Remote control: spend $80 on the microsoft one (yes thats right). The receiving end is USB with a long cable. The remote is a nice silver one with all the buttons. It works with lirc. Come round for a beer sometime if you want to see any of this working. -- Nick Rout
