HTPC Distro

[confuzzedintelguy]

So I've got quite a few old rigs laying around and I've slapped together a old P4 prescott with 4gigs of ram, 2tb of hdd, a 7800GT, Tv tuner ect for a htpc... however I'm stuck on which distro I would like to live with my options are XBMC which is now integrated with Ubuntu 12.1 or OpenELEC which is XBMC but in an embedded form so no GUI backend to slow things up. My debate is really leaning on OpenELEC as its well....embedded which means any real configuration would have to be done remotely or threw command line(Gentoo flashbacks) while if i just went with the Ubuntu XBMC I could easily hit the GUI backend and apt-get my self to happiness.  With this comes the price of performance tho as it will in no doubt in my mind swallow ram like there's no tomorrow..Ubuntu is just to pretty for its own good....Is it worth a horrid boot time with having to more than likely reboot more often than not or just go with the small footprint and never worry about it swallowing resources like there's no tomorrow? Whats your guys opinion/take?

 

 

P.S. MythTV is not an option I hate it and everything its has/had stood for....But I'm open for other embedded style distros that may fulfill my needs so feel free to fire those away at me if you can think of any.

 

Thanks

[freddie]

I'd say just go with OpenELEC. I was in a similar position recently and just didn't do anything in the end (all though i'd like to go back to it at some point) XBMCbuntu is terrible. You're better off doing your own Ubuntu minimal install and then slapping on XBMC on it afterwards if you wanna go the Ubuntu route. but yeah, i'd still say just give ELEC a shot.

Will you only be playing media locally or through network shares as well?

 

[d6bmg]

Another vote for OpenELEC. I'm using it in my raspberry pi and even in pi, it rocks.

[confuzzedintelguy]

Well that's how i figured it'd go lol i also found GeeXboX which seems to be OpenELEC but with a better addon repository I'm going to look into it aswell!