Setting up an HTPC Pt.1

In order to save a little money, I decided to go through the numbers of my phone, cell, net, and TV service. Currently, I have Verizon for a land line, DSL service, and a DirecTV package. I also recently dumped AT&T as my cell service because the coverage where I live was kind of spotty, it worked fine on my old Nokia phone but when I wanted to upgrade I couldn't get good service on any other phone. Where I live Verizon also requires me to have a land line to have DSL service, I had never liked that, so, the plan is to get rid of Verizon and go with cable.

I have no use for a land line phone if I am already paying for two cell phones, and compared to AT&T, Verizon's coverage is great, I can even use my cell in my basement which I could never do with AT&T.

Anyway, my current set up for internet and TV is Verizon home phone with DSL and DirecTV with a DVR. My plan is to get cable for internet and TV and use only cell phone service, changing this will save me about $50 a month (including taxes and without a DVR). With saving this much money and not leasing a DVR (along with my tax refund) I figured I could buy a small computer and create a DVR with it. This will also remove several components of my entertainment center, I have an old Xbox running XBMC that I use to stream movies from a file server in my basement, a DirecTV DVR, a DVD recorder if I wanted to archive a TV show from the DVR, and an HP thin client running Slax if I wanted to look at stuff online on a big screen. This HTPC will replace all of these, with saving $50 a month in bills I will be saving more on electricity as well.

This starts by buying an Acer Aspire Revo from Newegg.com for $350, it has enough power to handle HD video (my Xbox cannot), record TV (with a Plextor TV402U that I already owned), and it has an HDMI output. I received it yesterday, and currently it is making a copy of the harddrive that is inside it with a spare 250 GB, I will go through all the steps as I have time to do so.

When I received it I burned a CD of Ubuntu 10.04, this morning I set the Revo up in my work area with an external DVD drive and loaded the LiveCD version of Ubuntu. I opened the terminal and started a dd of the internal hard drive to an external hard drive, I am doing this as a percWhen I received it I burned a CD of Ubuntu 10.04, this morning I set the Revo up in my work area with an external DVD drive and loaded the LiveCD version of Ubuntu. I opened the terminal and started a dd of the internal hard drive to an external hard drive, I am doing this as a percrecievedaution When I received it I burned a CD of Ubuntu 10.04, this morning I set the Revo up in my work area with an external DVD drive and loaded the LiveCD version of Ubuntu. I opened the terminal and started a dd of the internal hard drive to an external hard drive, I am doing this as a precaution only a sort of "just in case" sort of thing if I need to use the warranty on it.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

 Normally I would have used dd_rescue to do this but being a factory setup I figured this was safe, plus, dd will halt on any errors so I will know if I have a bad hard drive from the factory. When it finished the copy I did a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04 (for it's long term support, instead of 10.10). I have set up the hard drive partitions as 30 GB for / (root), 8 GB for /home (won't really be used), 1 GB for /boot, 2 GB for swap, and the rest of drive (200 GB, more or less) will be used for the DVR mounted at /media/DVR.