Man, I was wrong. I’ll admit it. In a previous post, I mentioned how I was going to help my brother-in-law with building a very low cost HTPC. He had an old PC laying around. I didn’t know what speed it was but it was clear that it was maxed out with RAM, had no USB ports, and no AGP slot.

So, I put in another PCI video card I had that had RCA video out and took out the modem card and installed a NIC in it. It booted up fine into W2k. For a quick proof of concept, I booted off a Knoppix CD to see if the hard drive and other devices would be seen.

Now, I wasn’t paying attention, up to this boot to the boot messages, but Knoppix came up and said there was only 32MB free and I should make a swap space on the primary hard drive at least double my available RAM and it recommended between 60MB and 120MB. Hoo-boy. I then saw that it was an AMD K6 at 199Mhz. It also had a 4GB hard drive. This was going to be more trouble than it was worth.

I have a really old Dell that is 450Mhz. I just turned it off so maybe I’ll give this to him. I am now interested enough in continuing with this proof of concept as I have never played with MythTV. I still think a modded Xbox with XBMC might be the best way to go.