MythTV turns your computer into a media center

1. Linux can be customized far more than Windows or OSX, so your system can be set up to do exactly what you want it to do. In college, I had a spare Pentium 3 computer lying around that I wanted to use as a frontend to my media server. I didn’t care about (or want) a desktop or anything other than a media player that would play my files fullscreen. Since I had a wireless keyboard but no mouse and no remote, I wanted everything to be completely keyboard-driven. There were a few options from a “nice frontend” standpoint, most notably MythTV. However, since I wasn’t recording shows and I didn’t care so much about a fancy interface (I was fully happy with doing everything from command line since its easy enough to browse folders and play files), I settled on Ratpoison for the window manager. I set the system to boot up to a full-screen command line with a large font, and did all browsing from the command line. When I wanted to launch a file, I used mplayer set up to launch full screen. As a result, I could very quickly play a large variety of files without any GUI hassle or slowness.This was a special use, but it goes to show that Linux can be tailored in a nearly infinite number of ways. Want a large, cushy GUI? Try KDE. Want something barebones? Try XFCE or Fluxbox. Want to create a server and stick it in the closet? Just leave off the GUI — everything can be done command line. Choose what servers and services you want installed and what you want to run in the background. Finally, perhaps the best part — if you build a system using a distro like Gentoo (my distro of choice), you know and have control over everything going on. That’s power.

 

2. You can chain together basic system services to create your own custom software routines. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to wake up each morning to a different song from a playlist of about 100 songs that I had on my computer. When I got up, I wanted to first hear a random song from the playlist, then listen to current business headlines and weather read to me as I got ready. With Linux, setting this up was pretty basic. See my other blog post Talking Linux RSS Alarm Clock if you’re curious how I strung together several off-the-shelf components to create this app in only a few minutes.

 

3. You can custom-configure the OS to run well on even your old, underpowered computer.
   

   SSH clients like TouchTerm allow you to administer your machine from anywhere, even a cell phone

   
   The newest versions of Windows or OS X will run painfully slow on a computer that is more than 3 years old. This is because Vista and Leopard have become extremely bloated because of “features” like enhanced visual effects, indexed search and always-on spyware and virus protection. Visual effects are nice, but you certainly don’t want or need them when you’re using older hardware for basic tasks. Spyware and viruses are much less of a problem on Linux than on Windows, so you can get away without running any protection software on Linux (provided that you update they system regularly). Indexed search is one of the better features and almost worth the cycles it takes; however, if its an older computer, its nice to be able to forego this. Granted, you can turn off or lessen the effects of any of these three, but your system will still not be as peppy as it could otherwise be. With a stripped down Linux install, your old Pentium II can run basic apps with plenty of speed.

 

4. The system is fully accessible remotely, even over the slowest connection — even from a cell phone!With Windows, you only have control over the system remotely if you set up remote desktop, and even then, you’re severely limited to where you can connect from because sending a full screen requires a pretty fat connection. OSX is a little better — you can do the remote desktop, but you can also connect remotely over SSH, which only sends text and commands, so its a lot speedier. The problem with OSX is that most of the Apple software is designed to be used and configured through a GUI, so often there isn’t much that you’re able to do over command line. Almost anything in Linux is available over the command line, so when you connect remotely over SSH, you have as much (or almost as much) power as you have when sitting right at the desktop. If you regularly login this way, you can find applications that easily let you access your mail, play music (on the server computer) and even chat on IM all through the text-based terminal. Perhaps a special use, but its pretty convenient to be able to reboot your computer or restart your web server over your cell phone when you’re in the next state and need to retrieve a special file.

 

5. Its free, and you can try it without reformatting a computer. Check out a LiveCD like Ubuntu or Knoppix, both of which will bring you to a full-fledged Linux desktop as soon as you pop in the CD/DVD and reboot the computer. They allow you to get a very basic feel for the system without having to remove or disturb the existing OS underneath. Knoppix especially has a huge suite of applications that let you test out several programs for any given use without having to worry about downloading or installing them

 

6. Installing, maintaining and upgrading your software is a snap.Modern Linux distros (short for distributions) have very advanced package managers, which are programs that handle the search, installation, and maintenance of all of the programs on your system. Gentoo uses a system called portage, which downloads the source code for all the applications, compiles it, and installs it. This is a bit slower than just copying over pre-compiled binary packages, but [in theory] results in software thats exactly tailored for your PC. Ubuntu uses a system called apt, which is much faster than portage because all of the packages have already been compiled. In either case, finding an application is a quick command away, and installing it is only a few more keystrokes. When it comes time to upgrade, another few keystrokes can update an individual program, only system files, or every program on the computer. This is heads and shoulders above the OSX or Windows way of doing it, where you need to browse the web for a file, download it, and then go through the setup routine.
7. Linux is great with networking. Sharing files across a network? Want to set up your own web page and serve it to others? Want to connect automatically every time to other shares that people have set up, and have them seamlessly integrated into your file structure? Linux has industrial strength support for a variety of networking applications, such as Apache for web serving and Samba, NFS, scp, and a variety of other protocols for filesharing. Many of these are a click away from installing on a major distro, and can be seamlessly integrated into your files. While OSX does a pretty good job at this sort of thing, support for these services on Windows is spotty and incomplete, especially on the home versions. For example, if you have a music directory shared on Windows that you connect to using SMB (Samba), you can just set that share to appear in your home directory as /home/user/music, so it looks identical to any other directory in your system and can be manipulated and used by other programs just as easy.

 

8. Almost all of the best software for Linux is free! Just about anything you want to do with Windows is relatively easy to do with Linux, and chances are someone has written some very good free software to do it. In fact, I’ve found that software for Linux tends to be better-written and more powerful in many [most?] cases than its Windows or Mac counterpart. The reason behind this is that there is a huge network of software developers that use Linux, so when there is a glaring omission application-wise on Linux, the community is quick to step in and fix it. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, it is relatively easy to string together tools with Linux, so often application development is quick because application C makes use of applications A and B in an efficient way. Here is a [very, very brief] list of great free software on Linux:- Firefox [same program as Windows and OSX]
   - Amarok [music manager, syncs with an iPod. Comparable with iTunes, has some other interesting features]
   - KWrite [text editor, far more powerful than Notepad]
   - AbiWord or OpenOffice [word processing and office software, comparable to MS Office]
   - EasyTag [MP3 tag manager, very powerful for getting your songs tagged and named properly]
   - KAlarm [alarm clock program, can set alerts, timers and alarms on a one-time or recurring basis]
   - Pidgin [IM application, connects to AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Lots of cool plugins]
   - The Gimp [Powerful image editing program, comparable to Photoshop]   

   These are some of the applications that are free and useful to get going on a day-to-day basis. You’ll find that a huge amount of specialized programs exist, and are free, to do things like photo management, backup, games, etc.

9. LiveCDs exist for countless specialized uses, so advanced applications are just a disk image away Because Linux is so modular, any type of system can be built around the core. For desktop users, this typically includes a nice desktop graphical environment, a web browser, a word processor and a media player. However, not all computers and configurations need this much in terms of user applications.When I was in college, I wanted to be able to compile software on Gentoo faster by using a cluster of computers to break up the workload. The good news was that there was an abundance of powerful computers on the network (namely, my friends’ machines). The bad news was that none of them had Linux or the software needed to compile over the network. The solution was distccKnoppix, a LiveCD that came pre-setup with the DistCC compiler software I needed. After downloading and burning a few copies, I went around and rebooted the computers around me into the LiveCD environment and was soon compiling on 5 separate computers.
   Lots of other great LiveCD systems exist: MythBuntu turns your computer and TV into a media center, gOS creates a very simple cloud-computing enviroment built on Google Applications, Redwall Firewall turns a spare computer into a logfile-rich firewall for the network. Tons of other CDs exist for every other conceivable use from network attached storage (NAS) to kiosk-style arcade games. The old computer that was sitting in the closet collecting dust can easily be reborn in many different ways with a LiveCD install. Check out The LiveCD List for an extensive listing of LiveCDs.

 

10. New and cutting-edge features come very quickly to Linux because of the wide network of smart programmers all over the world.Since Linux is a collection of software made by programmers all over the world instead of simply an OS packaged by one company, you can have new developments on your desktop in days or weeks by simply updating your system instead of waiting years for the next release. Furthermore, the sheer number of different minds working on the problems creates a multitude of choices for any given application.For example, in the media player area, Amarok incorporates sophisticated music analysis and fingerprinting technologies that help identify your music and suggest music that you might also like. Similar features are now trickling down to iTunes, but Linux has had them for years. Users that were interested in incorporating information from databases like Last.fm could do much more quickly by using software in Linux than they could waiting for mainstream apps for Mac OS and Windows.Desktop environments like KDE 4 and Gnome are constantly pushing the envelope in user interface technologies and new features come every day that improve the experience and add functionality. Of course, not everything is a slam dunk, so some degree of willingness to test out cutting-edge technology is required, but for those that like to be at the forefront of new tech, Linux is the place to be.

The next decade will be about deconvergence. Perhaps you still have a PC in your den that can browse the web, play music, watch videos that you downloaded off of iTunes and myriad other PCish activities. However, that device will be far less important than it is now, or than it has been in the last 10 years. The idea of using your main PC for everything will fade as smaller, more specialized devices take over and cannibalize the attention that this big, expensive box receives.

Since trading my Treo in for an iPhone, my use of my laptop has greatly diminished. Since getting my laptop, my use of my desktop has greatly diminished. The idea here is that, like just about anyone, my main use for a computer is browsing the web and reading emails. When I got my laptop, no longer was it necessary to be chained to a seat in my room in order to read my websites. It was replaced by sitting on the couch in my living room, where I was able to browse the web without being secluded in a den. Email was similar — the iPhone handles Gmail admirably, so in the same vein, no longer did I have to be chained to a laptop [or desktop] to check my messages — instead, I just clicked on the mail icon on my phone, and there they were.

The exciting thing next on the horizon is small devices that don’t do it all, but do one thing really well, and do it in the most ideal location. I can easily imagine a kitchen device that does little more than email, recipe database, and a basic web browser. Want to write a paper? Too bad, can’t do it here. Want to play a video game? Nope. However, what you do want is basically a kiosk that makes it dead-simple to look up a recipe or follow up on an email with grandma, and this machine does it perfectly. Of course, the price point is important too — however, since the hardware requirements will be extremely modest since we won’t be storing large files or running lots of apps, we can get away with very basic hardware. Eventually, things like these will sell in the $100-150 range, and thats where we get critical mass. Devices like this do exist (the 3M Audrey was perhaps the first, and others have come and gone), but haven’t caught on, probably due to a high price point, poor or nonexistent marketing, and overly complicated or overly simplistic feature sets.

Similar equipment will come for the home stereo and theatre. AppleTV, which has [regrettably] gone largely unnoticed, is a very good first effort at this. Plug the $300 device into your home theater, and you can buy TV shows or movies from the iTunes store and easily watch them on the big screen. Pictures and music stream from your base computer as well. The next step improvement on this is the Roku Netflix Player, which streams 15,000 titles from Netflix into your home. It costs $100, which is barely more than a decent DVD player.

Why haven’t these devices fully caught on yet? For one, people just aren’t really used to getting their television content from a computer. Its still easier to tune into ABC at 7:00 on a Monday night to watch a TV show. Music has all but entirely transitioned to the web and to iTunes (and its better competitor, Amazon Music Store), thanks largely to Apple and the iPod. TV won’t be far behind, but will certainly take a bit more to get there.

Three things stand in the way: the first is simply society — people have to get used to getting off their main computer and allowing satellite devices to take the place for some activities. At this point, a lot of people simply aren’t thinking about how they could link up their computer to their home system and achieve a sort of media nirvana that doesn’t exist right now. DVDs are on their way out, and even BlueRay won’t be the next thing — forget physical disks, its all coming into your house through your internet connection. But it will take some time for basic home users to associate computing and home entertainment, and for the time being, its the job of the early-adopters to spread the word about this killer union.

Second is the price point. Many of the home devices try to be too much, or end up using hardware that is overkill for the most basic purposes that they will be used for. Others just haven’t hit the sweet spot where the price of the hardware and the market-clearing price of the unit have come into alignment. It will, though, and I think this zone, if not upon us, is closer than we think.

Finally, there are still technical barriers. Killer embedded systems will never run Windows or Mac OSX. These operating systems are designed for hub PCs, not for tiny devices running on a basic microchip. A fledgling startup, the kind of company that could likely hit this idea on the head, can’t easily strip down Windows to the point where it runs efficiently on the most basic of systems. Linux is perfectly suited for this, since you can take out all of the excess and leave just the basics, which I see as a kernel, some display drivers, perhaps some sound drivers, some networking, and a few services on top of that to handle communications with other computers in the home. Perhaps a generic server can power your kitchen device, your AV device and your bedroom web-browsing device. DRM is poison to the process, so hopefully the nascent push out of DRM will continue and spread to video content as well as audio content.

My vision of the future? Technology won’t be something you sit down at a desk to access — instead, it will be something that surrounds you and assists everywhere you go. The web isn’t something you open a browser to get on, but rather, the backbone for a dozen of your daily activities, without you even realizing it.

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