Ogi

[Ogi]

It won’t get more efficient than this guy: http://openelec.tv/  distro size is between 55 and 80MB … been following his development on the XBMC forums, it’s rather impressive.  Not sure what kind of boot up times they are seeing, but it really can’t be much.

 

The last time I tried to install gentoo, I about pulled my hair out, then again that was 5+ years ago…

[Ogi]

Thanks for the reply Aaron,

I can’t think of what else I would have connected to the board besides a graphics card.  Perhaps a bluetooth controller, but that can be done through an external USB dongle.  I also don’t plan on having any kind of optical disk drive, just 1 SSD drive (preferably something small like 16GB, or perhaps even smaller if I find a decent performing one for cheap).

[Ogi]

Hey Michael,

 

XBMC has it’s own distro you can install from their Live package.  I believe it’s just a minimal unbuntu install that comes w/ all the drivers you need.  There is a guy on the XBMC forms that actually made his own distro for the sole purpose of eliminating anything unnecessary to achieve faster boot up times.  I may experament with that (called Elec.tv or something like that).

I have a netgear gigabit switch.  Don’t have the model in front of me, but it is a 5 port, somewhat older (not too old since it is gigabit).  It registers the network connection as a gigabit, not just 100BaseT.  

My desktop uses a .. I want to say realtek Network controller, perhaps a Nvidia one.  In my WHS, I have 3x 2TB WD Green drives and 1x 1TB factory drive for the system drive (it’s the HP MediaSmart EX490).  Those drives while not exactly peak performers, should be able transfer files at a rate greater than 30ish MB/s.  I’ve been debating doing a server restore and essentially reinstalling the WHS OS on the drive (or replacing the system drive w/ another 2TB drive, and doing a server recovery).  Regardless, this is an issue I can worry about at a later time,  but when I do start troubleshooting, I’ll be sure to come here 🙂

 

 

 

[Ogi]

Considering XBMC can offload the video decoding to the graphics card, I don’t think I will have a need for the i5 anytime soon.  The most recent issue I’ve had is with network transfer speeds from my WHS box.  I’m getting around 30MB/s, and I should be getting closer to 80-90MB/s … but I’ll have to look into that at another time.

 

I was thinking it’s funny how with all the time we’ve spent playing hoops, we never talked about interests outside of basketball haha.  

 

I’ll look at that board.  I also need to evaluate some smaller SSDs that I can run XBMC off of (I hope to get a sub 10 second boot up time on this box, and using a minimal ubuntu (other linux distro) with a SSD, I think it’s a reasonable goal).

[Author]

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