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A Truly Silent Home Theater PC Built for Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fun-toys-to-play-with dept.

slimrabbit writes "LinuxDevices is reporting on a truly silent home theater PC that comes with its own Fedora 5 based quick install Linux DVD capable of installing a fully-configured FC5 system with LIRC, KDETV, TV-Time and Kradio in about 15 minutes. The most notable features are its "church mouse quiet" 14dba power supply, TV-Out (SVideo and composite), component video, DVI and VGA out, and hardware MPEG support(XvMC). The company also supports and engages the Linux community through its sponsorship program. It is sponsoring knoppmyth and the Debian User Project and makes the mechanical drawings of its face plates available under the GPL."

4 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Good price tag too by growse · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is interesting - for $300 they've created something that beats me spending my own time and money on building myself. Previously when I've seen "silent" under-the-tv boxes, they've been closer to $800. This is enough to make the average geek think "I'll just build one myself". That, however, takes time and effort, and there's no guarantee that it'll work properly at the end of it.

    To get a barebones, including a nice case and decent psu for this price makes it worthwhile getting over a diy system. Only question is, does it suck because it's cheap?

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    1. Re:Good price tag too by scottnews · · Score: 3, Interesting

      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16856110050
      Here is the equivalent system without the distro. It shouldn't be too hard to configure Linux for this.

  2. FC5? Good luck putting MythTV on it... by jerkychew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been battling my MythTV install for the past couple days, and am working on it as we speak, so this article is perfect timing.

    This device appears to be little more than a barebones PC and a lot of marketing induced FUD. Others have already touched on the lack of HDD, CPU and RAM, so I won't bring those back up. What I will bring up is my suspicion of the true reason why it doesn't have MythTV - Because MythTV under FC5 is a serious pain in the arse. To quote Axel Thimm from this posting on the Atrpms-users mailing list:

    "Anyway, all in all currently mythtv on FC5 isn't an easy ride. If you
    don't want to get in adventures, don't upgrade yet. Wait at least
    until the fixed kernel makes it into updates proper."

    I had originally loaded FC5 on my MythTV candidate, only to run into whacky issue after whacky issue. I formatted and reloaded to FC4, following the holy grail of MythTV install guides, and the install has been much smoother. (I'm just trying to nail down the audio / video sync issues - I gotta get my line out to stop playing 'live' audio, dammit!)

    I think you'd be better off speccing out a PC from NewEgg or something, rather than purchasing one of these boxes.

  3. It does not look silent to me. by niceone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The PSU looks quiet, but it's not fanless.

    There are two case fans - I couldn't see how loud they are, they say "Case fans as low as 1200rpm", but they look pretty small and small fans are usually pretty whiney.

    The model that comes with a CPU seems to use a stock heatsink/fan and there doesn't look like there's a lot of room in there for a quieter solution. Also there are air holes straight above the CPU which are going to let the noise straight out.

    I didn't find anywhere where they quoted a sound level for the whole system - maybe I missed it?

    I have no idea how this compares to other HTPC form factor solution, but it sure isn't "truely silent".

    --
    ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.