Another HTPC

As my parents asked for their own HTPC, I built one for them ;-)

This time I am using an Asus M3N78-VM motherboard with an AMD Athlon II X2 240 CPU and 2 GB RAM as basis, again in a Digitainer case. A 1 TB WD10EADS harddisk from Western Digital completes the system, no optical drive has been installed so far. The motherboard is larger than the one I used to refurbish my Digitainer, but it just fits into the case.

Software is again Ubuntu 9.10 amd64 and XBMC.

HTPC and LCD

When I first connected my old (but refurbished) HTPC via VGA to the LG LCD TV the screen resolution was auto configured to 1360 x 768. Changing via nvidia-settings to 1920 x 1080 was only possible for the running session and gone after reboot.

Trying to make it permanently via the "Save configuration to X conf" button resulted only in "Failed to parse existing X config file ‘/etc/X11/xorg.conf’"...

Solution was found at Wetware:
recreate xorg.conf with sudo nvidia-xconfig and save the settings permanently with sudo nvidia-settings afterwards ;-)

Thanks to Wetware!

Recent positive experiences

With the following products I have made positive experiences recently:

• Sony BDP S360 Blu-ray player
• LG 32LH3000 LCD TV
• Epson SX600FW printer, scanner, copier and fax with WiFi
• DIGITUS external NAS case for 3,5"-HD

Ubuntu servers

Recently I had to configure two servers on older hardware, in both projects I chose Ubuntu 9.10 32bit Server edition as base for the systems.

• Server 1 (AMD Athlon Processor 1.1 GHz, 640 MByte RAM) is an internal file server with remote access via SSH and Apache on the stored files.
• Server 2 (AMD Sempron Processor 3000+, 768 MByte RAM) publishes an Oracle Apex driven website with about 10.000 views per month.

For remote administration webmin is being used in both cases.

Digitainer upgrade

Since being replaced by the new HTPC, the Digitainer which served this part for nearly 3 years, was due for an upgrade:

• Biostar GF8200C M2+ motherboard
• AMD Athlon II X2 215 cpu
• 2 GB RAM
• 500 GB Samsung HD502HI harddisk

It runs with Ubuntu 9.10 amd64 and of course XBMC.

As remote controls I use

• Generalkeys 2.4GHz mini wireless keyboard with mouse function
• Auvisio remote control VRC-1100 (Vista MCE Remote Control)