
For once, I won’t be annoyed by your link comments! Lemur2, I’m counting on you providing at least 15 links. Easy codec installation would be nice, and some way to install and update Chrome would be very welcome too (my friends and I often watch YouTube music videos or live performances while enjoying a few drinks). Note that anything Ubuntu-based is out of the question, as I don’t want to encounter that bug again the next time I run an apt-get dist-upgrade. Curiously, TV support is not required (I don’t record TV). This last bit is crucial, as I want show descriptions, episode guides, etc. An equivalent may be acceptable, but I at least need a good and clean interface, and support for downloading show metadata over the internet.

Boxee is available for Linux, so that shouldn’t be a problem. On top of that, it needs NTFS-write access to this drive, too, since I download my TV shows (legal in The Netherlands, don’t worry) on my main desktop, and then transfer them over the network to the drive. The Linux distribution for this machine must be able to share this drive easily with the Windows machines in my network, with as little hassle as possible. All my media files (TV shows, mostly) are stored on an external hard drive attached to this system via USB. Most importantly – this HTPC is also my media server. I do have a few needs when it comes to this one.


Since my preference in distributions lies with Debian-based systems, and Ubuntu in particular,I obviously went for the latest Ubuntu release, version 9.10. Now, however, I want to try Linux as an HTPC operating system, but I kind of ran into a roadblock there with Ubuntu 9.10 – so the question is: what is a good HTPC Linux distribution? It performed its job fine running Windows 7 and Boxee, and over the past few months, it ran Mac OS X Leopard with Plex.

I have an Atom 330-based tiny computer which I use as my HTPC.
