Since I bought the Xbox I’ve been sitting on a couch a whole lot, playing GTAIV, Uno and others, as well as watching movies streaming from a my PC to my TV, works great, all wirelessly (sucked it up and bought the AU$169 adapter). Before the Xbox I use to watch most of my TV shows and movies on my PC, along with gaming on the PC, was perfectly comfortable, in fact I seem to feel more confortable there than on the couch, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’ve still usually got my laptop sitting next to me on the couch, so I’m not missing anything in terms of the casual browsing of the Internets, so what is it? I can only assume it’s due to the fact that I’ve spent so  much time in front of the PC that I feel more at home with it. I’m also beginning to think that I get much more immersed in PC games than console games. headphones on, nice and close to the screen, it all seems more intense. Don’t get me wrong I’m loving GTAIV in front of the TV, but I’m wondering if I’d be enjoying it more if I was playing it at my computer desk. Maybe I should invest in a HDMI to DVI adapter and plug my Xbox into my PC monitor.

On another note, I’ve got a nice new widget in my sidebar that displays my Gamertag details, it’s simply called the Xbox 360 Gamercard Wordpress plugin. It doesn’t come as a widget, so I’m using another plugin to use it as a widget, that’s called the Custom Function Widget, nice!

So a while ago I dove into the world of Linux based HTPC’s, namely, MythTV. I have all the hardware. a Silverstone LC20 Media case with Soundgraph iMon Pad remote control and VFD display. I run o’ the mill MSI motherboard with an AMD Athlon X2 4000+ CPU, 512MB of RAM, 250GB IDE Hard drive and a Hauppauge Nova T-500 Dual HD digital TV tuner. For the record. I DID get it all working, everything, the remote, the VFD the TV tuner, it was working quite well. But there were issues, both due to drivers and my laziness. The TV tuner driver wasn’t super good, after a few hours it would simply hang and not pick up any channels anymore, and the remote wasn’t particularly good because I never really got around to configuring it properly. Back in the day I went for Mythdora, probably the simplest Myth TV distribution out there. It uses Fedora, which was new to me, yum installs and whatnot. I had to do a whole mess of things just to get the TV tuner going and the VFD, I had to download drivers, make, build, all that fancy Linux stuff that I have never really bothered to learn. This time, I’m going for another recently released package, Mythbuntu, which is like Mythdora, but based off the Ubuntu distribution. It seems to have a much bigger community so I’m hoping driver support and general setup support is a bit better.

So I’ve just started to run the Mythbuntu installer CD now, and I’m going to post everything that I do, mainly for my own reference if anything, and it may help others along the way. The standard install process for Mythbuntu is incredibly easy, put in the CD, run the “install Mythbuntu” icon and follow the Wizard, which is what I’ve just done. The iMon PAD remote was in the list of supported remotes, which is nice, whether it works or not is another question. My first place of business though will be the TV tuner, which apparently has much better support in the latest kernel, but we’ll see.