I just recalled that Windows 98 and Me are no longer supported by Microsoft. This reminded me of my media PC troubles I had recently. What I wanted was a small and good-looking PC that should be able to stream movie files and music to the TV. I guess the easy way would have been to buy a fully-fledged media PC somewhere. That would probably have been the smart choice as well – just buy the machine and get everything pre-installed. Too bad that I’ve never been smart.

Instead, I searched long and hard for nice components; I looked at chassis for weeks, and internal components for twice as long. “Should it be big enough to support PCI cards? Should I go for a Pentium M?” And on and on. I finally decided on this particular configuration:

• VIA EPIA MII Mini-ITX motherboard. This is a damn sexy piece of equipment: it has a 1 GHz CPU, built-in graphic card with MPEG2 decoding and TV-out, built-in audio, a PCI slot, and a PCMCIA slot.
• Silverstone LC-06. Another sexy thing; I love the sleek look of this case. It’s an ITX case that has room for a 3.5″ hard drive and a full-size DVD-ROM. Yay! No need to go for expensive ones.
• Logitech LX7 Cordless Optical Mouse. I don’t want more remotes, and a mouse is much better, in my opinion. This mouse looks damn nice as well, so I don’t mind having it on my living room table.
• In addition to this, I was planning to have a 3,5″ HD, PCMCIA WLAN card and a DVD-ROM.

Things didn’t really proceed as planned. First of all, I had an old Netgear WG111 WLAN USB dongle, so I used that one instead; it’s supported by almost every operating system known to man. Secondly, after assembing everything, I noticed that the EPIA’s CPU fan wasn’t as quiet as I’d hoped. No bother, but still not quiet. This made me reconsider the HD, and I started looking for alternatives.

Booting everything off a Compact Flash card seemed like a better idea! I got myself a 1 GB Compact Flash chip and a cheap CF -> IDE converter that supported boot, and I thought I was cooking. Turns out that this adapter is designed to plug straight into the IDE slot. Do you think that there was room for that in the LC-06 case? Hell no. And have you ever tried to find an extension IDE cable? I know that there are places in the US that sell these, but they are completely unavailable in Sweden! Seriously. Impossible to get. I ended up having to make one myself with some help from the hardware-oriented people at work.

Now comes the troublesome part. In my tests with the HD I had used Windows XP SP2 together with the Media Portal media portal and Media Player Classic. I loved the GUI and it worked like a charm. But lo and behold! Since I only had 1 GB of flash, I couldn’t install Windows XP on it. I read about a way to do it anyway: first installing it to a HD, shrinking the installation to ~800 MB, making the HD partition 1 GB large, and then cloning it to the Compact Flash. I’m sure that this is possible in theory, but if you feel like trying this yourself: don’t bother. You might get it to work, but I failed after many long hours of trying to get the cloned flash installation to boot up properly. It seems to depend way too much on what kind of IDE adapter you have, and similar things. Make sure you buy at least 2 GB of flash, and install the OS directly to the flash instead.

So, I couldn’t use Windows XP. And guess what? Media Portal demands Windows XP. For fun, I installed Windows 98 and got it up and running. (This is where this blog entry’s first line starts to get relevant!) It worked like it should; but what I had forgotten was that “like it should” is a relative term, and Windows 98 is very aged today! It may have been my Netgear dongle, but the OS crashed and lost the connection and everything sucked worse than a Thai hooker! Totally unacceptable; after this I have complete understanding for Microsoft’s dropping Windows 98 support.

I started looking around for alternatives to Media Portal and Windows XP, and GeeXBoX looked extremely promising. A minimal Linux distribution with a complete media player, a great interface and whatnot. It looked marvellous, and worked well – except for the fact that there is no mouse support. I really don’t want a remote, so this was right out. I tried a couple of other distributions using MythTV, but not a single one of these could be installed on just 1 GB. Huh? I thought Linux was supposed to be small and compact and all that. This just gives more fuel to my opinion that Linux stuff all too often is bloated due to all the dependencies.

Well, of course the same is true for Windows programs. Media Portal requires .NET and all kinds of stuff.

Anyway, I ended up installing Windows 2000 on the Compact Flash; it’s a nice middle road, and it’s stable enough. I do miss Media Portal, but I’m sure that I’ll find another good media portal project sooner or later - or maybe I’ll get a 2 or 4 GB Compact Flash card. In the mean time I’ll probably write my own lightweight interface – at heart I am a DIY guy after all!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.