At the same time, I have had this "no-frill" Intel/ASUS (Dual Core, motherboard is ASUS P5KPL) PC for over a year, several wireless routers as well as this Panasonic cordless phone (with an FXO port) along with other peripherals, not to mention the Netbook which was basically not doing much other than collecting dust...
Quite a waste, I thought.
So in the beginning of this year, a "Home Media Center" idea came to mind, giving credit to a colleague with lots of experiences with MythTV/MeTV on Ubuntu.
I wanted to convert the Intel/ASUS P5KPL PC into something along this line. Initially I was aiming to build a DVB-T (digital TV) recorder which could also stream DVD and TV over WiFi to all computers at home. I also thought it could simply be done once I purchased a TV card, running on FreeBSD.
Why FreeBSD? Mostly due to previous work experiences and personally I felt more comfortable with this operating system in comparison to other linux/unix distros.
Unfortunately, getting the FreeBSD DVB-T driver to work turned out to be much more difficult than initially anticipated... I have purchased two DVB TV cards from MSY (KWorld TPC-160-T and Leadtek DVR3200H) but soon given up.
The challenges I encountered included KWorld DVB being recognized as an USB connector when I did a "pciconf -lv"; Also, the onboard NIC (Realtek) could not be detected and I had to use Realtek website's BSD's driver... which replaced the original "rl" source code required by cx88 driver to be compiled(?). The Leadtek card could be seen on but the cx88 was not loaded onto it (I am starting to feel this deserve another post with all the specs and such)...
Anyway, it was getting too much having stayed up till 2am for over two weeks while working full-time. I decided to this plan on hold.
During these attempts, the lack of bandwidth was also becoming apparent. Because I never connected my phone-line nor sign up for DSL service, the only way I could allow this PC to access the internet was to share the 3g modem's connection through Vista's internet connection sharing (ICS). It simply wasn't fast enough, nor the 3g data plan had enough data (Imagine doing a "portsnap fetch/extract/update" on FreeBSD would have taken me a good couple of hours and consumed a substantial portion of my monthly quota).
In the end, I spent A$125 at a second hand computer shop to purchase a Compaq P4 with 32G Hard-drive. It would soon become a FreeBSD internet access gateway and is still working well. Also, I decided to sign up for DSL (and to my joy iiNet also gave me a VoIP account along with other stuffs, but that's for a different post).
A second hand Compaq, ADSL2 DSL connection, and a bunch of other equipments.
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