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Currently I am working on a couple of projects at home. They are not anything of any significance but may be of some importance to the casual reader.

Apart from the major Car project I am currently looking into a couple of other things.

Acer Aspire One Netbook

In the Same vein as the alternate desktop I have purchased 3 acer aspire one netbooks. One from Tesco based on an online offer and two from Dixons based on a different offer. One Reason for the purchase of three was to satisfy the need to replace a now defunct portable DVD player and to try some of the online modes and OS's now available for this hardware platform.

Currently I have One with ubuntu Remix, a lightweight version of ubuntu Januty Jacaklope 9.04. One has MAC OSX 10.5 with ILife '08 installed. The last one has Windows 7.

Linux Distributions

An alternate desktop environment rather than windows. A good source of information and help is distrowatch which has current information on Live CD and installation CDs for Linux x86 builds.

It allows anybody with a small amount of computing knowledge to download and run (in some cases without installation over the base OS) and alternate Linux Operating system. I have several different spec machines and my only requirement was that the environment be compatible across all of them. They include a Athlon 2800+, a Compaq 500Mhz and a HP Athlon laptop.

As part of the Compaq build, which is currently using Windows XP Professional, it has to mimic windows as it it primarily being used by my wife for her work and my daughter for her online games. So far I have tried the following Live CD distributions : Slax, Damn Small, Feather and Yoper but concentrated on the distributions below.

Another project I am pursuing is to find a credible linux media server. On a windows XP installation I have used media monkey for playing and cataloging my personal MP3 collection. I am attempting to find a Linux alternative that could potentially boot up as a Live CD and create an environment that can play MP3, WMV and AVI content on a x86 machine. I have been focusing on Freevo but I am also looking at MvthTV.

Yet another project I am working on is a bootable version of linux on a Pen Drive. Most of the information I have got for this is via pendrivelinux website that has packages and details procedures for creating a bootable linux drive. I have built ubuntu on a 2gb Kingston stick.

Gentoo

I have had great success with Gentoo on the laptop with the Live CD booting up cleanly and accessing all peripherals successfully. Not so much joy with the Athlon 2800+. On boot up the screen goes blank. I will need to investigate that and see if the is a known issue or just an incompatible version!

Knoppix

After downloading the Knoppix Live CD (4.02) and running it on my the laptop and the Athlon 2800+ it work very well. One of the better supported Linux builds that seems to be compatible will all my hardware configurations.

Ubuntu

I have had most success with ubuntu a debian release that seems to be well supported and popular. Run initially as a Live CD on my Athlon 2800+ machine and then I installed it on a spare hard drive.

I have only come across a couple of problems: The main one was support for the Netgear PCI Wireless card. It seem to be discovered by Device manager but did no allow any access the interweb. Found a ubuntu forum that identified this problem. The required solution was to link some device files and reboot. Another issue was that I had 2 x FAT32 120GB drives that where not mounted by default. This problem was remedied by making the additional entries in the /etc/fstab and a machine reboot.

The next stage is to install the MP3 and DVD support material available at easyubuntu...Last I checked there was a problem with the repository.

Linux Media Servers

Freevo

After reading a couple of reviews freevo seemed like a good option to start off with. Now I think this may have been a bit unlucky ...! I have had problems with getting all the dependancies on the ubuntu machine. At the moment the only option I have is to download and compile the source which I have not got round to doing yet.

MythTV

A more verbose and better supported product than Freevo and One that I have not as yet tested. If I can't iron out the problems with freevo then this will be the alternative.

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