Tutorial Overview

I'm putting together a tutorial for building / installing / and configuring a linux-media-box. The system will be using a hard drive containing the Operating System (Ubuntu - Gutsy) as well as 4 additional hard drives setup in RAID-5.

Basically what I wanted to do was have a media-box using my TV as its monitor. The media-box will use Elisa as a media center front end with a M$ media remote control to navigate. I also wanted to have a user I could remote into from my laptop and run applications "behind the scenes" while the media center was running on the TV.

So here's how to make all that happen!


Here's a list of the hardware that was used:

1. 1x - GIGABYTE GA-M57SLI-S4 rev. 2.0 Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard
   
   
2. 1x - AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Brisbane 2.5GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Socket AM2 Processor
   
   
3. 4x - Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
   
   
4. 1x - Western Digital Caviar SE 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
   
   
5. 1x - Thermaltake Wing RS 101 Black / Silver ATX Mid Tower PC Case with 430W Power Supply
   
   
6. 2x - Patriot Signature 1GB DDR2-800 CL 5 Desktop Memory
   
   
7. 1x -EVGA nVidia GeForce 8500GT 256MB DVI/HDCP PCI-Express Video Card
   
   
8. 1x - SAMSUNG Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 12X DVD+R DL 20X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD±R Burner
   
   
9. 1x - SONY Black 1.44MB 3.5" Internal Floppy Drive Model MPF920 Black
   
   
10. 1x - Microsoft Media Remote & Receiver
    

The tutorial was broken up into the following sections:

• Hardware Assembly and Installation
• Operating System & Hard Drive Configuration
• Setting up the RAID Array
• Setting up Elisa Media Center
• Setting up the Remote Control (LIRC)
• Setting up a Remote Connection
• Auto-startup of LIRC and Elisa

So let's get started: Hardware Assembly & Installation