[mythtv-users] Cheap frontend and network boot

[Paul Bender]

J wrote:
> I was looking to build a frontend out of similar hardware as stated: 
> http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_epia.php ... but that mobo isn't sold 
> anymore (and its sold over in the UK, I'm from north America, that 
> shipping is going to be more then the parts themselves) anybody have any 
> ideas on something similar I can get from say newegg?

You can get the VIA EPIA SP8000E from here 
<http://www.logicsupply.com/products/sp8000e>.

However, unless you have a compelling reason for wanting that 
motherboard, you might want to consider something else. With that 
motherboard, you will only be able to decode SDTV MPEG2. In addition, 
you will find the responsiveness to be somewhat sluggish compared to 
most non-VIA hardware.

For the same (or lower) price, you can get an NVIDIA+AMD Micro-ATX 
motherboard that will support HDTV MPEG2 and not be somewhat sluggish.

> I was also looking for a way to have a network boot without changing my 
> DHCP server, my DHCP is run on a linux machiene so I can configure it 
> any way that will allow this...

If you are running the ISC DHCP server or some other reasonably 
configurable DHCP server, then you should have no problem. You might 
check out <http://minimyth.org/document-boot.html#network> for more 
information on how to configure it.