Perspectoff Setup

Here is my setup, step by step.

• Built my house. I included a central wiring closet where I located all my telephone connections in a patch panel (including a DSL output with DSL filter), all cable connectors (including satellite dish and extra wiring from a wireless antenna used for Internet) to separate patch panels, all my CAT5e wiring (to a patch panel), and all my whole-house speaker wiring (to a patch panel with Banana-plug connections). I also have analog Greyfox cameras (power over Ethernet type) terminating in this closet, with RCA video outputs. This wiring closet is air-conditioned. It is dedicated to house electronics only. I Included plenty of power outlets and surge protectors.

• Replaced switches with X10 switches.

• Placed a whole house HTD MA-1235 audio amp (12 channels) in the wiring closet. Connected each speaker wire to one channel, independently.

• For a hybrid Core/Media Director PC I used a Walmart $299 W3644 Gateway/eMachine with 64 bit Sempron (at 2.1 GHz, 512KB L2 cache, 1600MHz system bus), 1Gb dual channel DDR RAM, nVidia GeForce 6100 series integrated video with 128 Mb shared video memory, 160 Gb HDD, DVD-CD RW, Targus wireless USB mouse. (Drawbacks: not enough PCI expansion slots).

• Placed a Bluecherry video capture board in a PCI slot (although in retrospect I would have used a PCI-express slot for this board and saved the PCI slot for something else). I connected the RCA outputs from the analog cameras to the Bluecherry video capture board using RCA-BNC adapters. (No sound).

• Added a second Ethernet NIC card. It is best to use a Gigabit speed card. This card will be used for the "internal" LinuxMCE network, which likes faster data transmission speeds. Choose carefully if you want to use a PCI-Express slot or a PCI slot. The card must match the slot you intend to put it in.

• I plugged my home router (which was connected to my DSL modem) into the original Ethernet port of the PC. I bought a second Gigabit wireless router and plugged it into the second Ethernet NIC card.

• Using a separate PC, I connected to the new router wirelessly and entered the administration web page of the new router. I turned off the DHCP capabilities of the router. (This allows the PC to provide the DHCP for the internal LinuxMCE network, instead.)

1. On a separate PC, I downloaded Kubuntu 7.10 64 bit edition (since my processor is 64 bit) and burned it onto a CD according to the instructions (I happened to use InfraRecorder on a Windows PC).

1. Downloaded the live version of the partition manager Gparted and burned it onto a CD (using InfraRecorder on a Windows PC).

1. Booted the Gparted Live CD on the new Walmart PC that I intended to use for the LinuxMCE server. This showed the active partitions. I chose to keep the pre-installed Windows on the machine in its own partition, but shrunk the Windows NTFS partition down to about 20 Gb. This left me with about 135 Gb free space. I saved my changes and exited the Gparted Live CD.

1. I then booted the Kubuntu 7.10 (AMD64) Live CD. I chose the "Install Kubuntu Option." I went through the choices, and when it came to partitioning, I chose to do "Guided partitioning of largest available free space."

This placed Kubuntu on the 135 Gb from the previous step, with a small swap partition.

1. The Kubuntu installer automatically recognized the Windows partition and OS and confirmed that this was the only other operating system. The GRUB bootloader was then configured automatically.

1. Upon rebooting, Kubuntu was the automatic OS at the top of the GRUB boot list. I allowed Kubuntu to start automatically.

1. Once Kubuntu was fully loaded (and had finished its automatic configuration), I opened K3b and placed the Kubuntu Live CD into the CD drive. Using K3b, I then copied the .iso file from the CD onto the hard drive, into my /home folder and made sure it was named kubuntu-desktop-7.10_amd64.iso.