User:Lozarythmic

Introduction

Inspired by Itsmeok, i decided to document my build from start to finish. After scanning the forums for ages and looking for issues that I might run into, as well as making a virtualbox test install on my laptop, I feel I'm prepared enough to get going!

Yesterday I bought the hardware for my first hybrid:

Mobo: Asus P5N7A-VM

CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E7400

RAM: 2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX DDR2

GFX: Nvidia 9300 onboard mobo

HDD: 1TB Hitachi Deskstar

Case: Antec NSK2480 v2 (uk)

PSU: 380 Watt incl w/ case

TV: Hauppage PVR-150

For my core I'm using some existing hardware. It's a Gigabyte Nforce 3 socket 939 board (i'll get the model later) with 1GB ram and a 4200 X2 CPU which i've just bought to give it some more horsepower. Disk-wise it's got a 250G IDE drive and a couple of 80GB sata drives which are currently striped. Still not sure what to do with them, i'll probably make a decision once I see what LMCE's raid capabilities are like.

Update (01/02/2009) : Got the system built yesterday but didn't have time to test it fully. Install went smoothly for the most part (I had trouble seeing a couple of the lists, and lmce couldn't determine my timezone), however when I moved the core into the office where it'll live, it didn't like the fact that i changed from a USB to PS/2 mouse. Will investigate this tonight!

Update (03/02/2009) : Reinstalled yesterday due to a few issues, mainly that i added a DVD-ROM to the core and changed the networking setup to reflect more accurately the setup described here. The only thing I did differently was disable wireless on the internet router. I tried a PXE boot of my MD but got the kernel panic at the network card error i've seen mentioned on the forums a few times. As i'll be using VDR, i've been told I should do a proper install of MCE on the MD, which i'll be doing tonight. I've got a potential diskless MD which is an old shuttle system, so i'll look into PXE booting a bit more then.

Update (20/02/09) : Having a few problems with my MD setup so i'm concentrating on my core for now. As I have a slow internet connection, I installed squid on my core and wrote a wiki page for anyone that's interested