New myth frontend

Built a new myth front end today with these components -

• Asus P5KPL-CM $50
• Evga GeForce 9400 GT $50 (before $20 MIR)
• Kingston 1gig DDR2 $10
• Intel Celeron 2100 $50
• Seagate 120gig hard drive $?
• Antec NSK2480 Case $100

I love this case. It is a tad bit large, but looks right at home under our TV. Came with a 380 watt power suply, two large 120 mm fans (with speed control). Chose the Asus board because it was in stock, has 6 audio plugs instead of the 3 that normally come on the G31 based boards. The evga card supports VDPAU, plus all of our other cards are evga models - might as well stick with what works. Picked the Celeron because it was the cheapest Intel CPU Microcenter had in stock. Had the Seagate laying around collecting dust. $260 for a complete system, not too bad.

The Celeron feels like a Celeron (duh). Even though it is a 2.0ghz dual core, I'd say my PDC 2140 (1.6 Pentium dual core) has more power. No test results to prove this, it just feels that way. The PDC 2140 is in an identical setup, except with a Biostar G31 motherboard. Both systems are running Slackware©-current with the packages I've recompiled.

If you notice, I did not purchase an Optical drive. I have plenty of ATAPI drives already. What I neglected to do was purchase another SATA hard drive. All of my spare hard drives are IDE. The Asus board has 4 SATA ports, and one IDE 2 channel port. The case is setup in a way that it wouldn't be practical to use an IDE hard drive and optical drive with one IDE cable. I'll purchase a new SATA drive latter and just clone the installed drive over to it.

This brings me to installing Slackware© without an optical drive. No sweat, there's a USB boot image. dd it to my 1 gig usb drive, boot the PC, Slackware© setup is running. Yeah! No network! Damn! The Asus board is using the Attansic L1 network chip. Well there is a kernel module for it, but no eth0 devise. I fooled around with attempting to make my own USB image on a 1 gig and 2 gig usb stick. Nothing I did worked. Followed alienbob's scripts from here ->usbinstall Didn't work either. My 2 gig usb stick is only 1.9 gig. While searching for solutions I found this application UNetbootin. Easy to use, and it actually worked! Stuck my usb stick back in the PC. I was presented with an option to chose my kernel, then install went on it's ..... until

Until I was presented to select the source medium. Crossing my fingers I let the installer search for the medium on its own. Nope. Just switched VT's and mounted the drive to /mnt/tmp. Installation completed without any hiccups I like installing from a usb stick. It's faster than using a DVD, and almost as fast as an nfs install.

Now I have a myth frontend running without issues, and got to do away with the tower sitting next to the TV.