LinHES For Linux

LinHES is an open source attempt to make the installation of a GNU/Linux operating system and the MythTV media center software as trivial as possible. It includes everything one needs to get a decent settop box up and running in a shortest time as possible.

The distribution can be downloaded via Softpedia’s secure servers or from its official website as a single, dual-arch Live CD ISO image of approximately 700MB in size, engineered to run on either 64-bit (x86_64) or 32-bit (i386) hardware platforms. You must write the ISO image to a CD disc or USB flash drive of 1GB or higher capacity in order to boot it from the BIOS of a computer.

From the boot menu of the Live CD, you can boot the live environment with default options and drivers, directly start the graphical installer without boot splash screen (verbose mode) or using the VNC install method, boot an existing OS, run the Memtest86+ utility to test the RAM, run the HDT (Hardware Information Tool) utility to view detailed hardware information, reboot the machine or boot the distribution on special hardware, such as Atomic Ant.

Before you can access the MythTV user interface, you will be prompted by some sort of a welcome screen that includes links to an official installation guide, the main bug tracker of the distribution and the support channels. Clicking the large OK button will redirect you to the first time setup wizard where it is a must to select a language and country. Then you can install the distribution or just run the MythTV frontend.

Summing up, LinHES is a great and popular distribution of Linux that uses the MythTV open source media center software and supports a wide range of computers, so you will be able to easily assemble a box that has the following functions: PVR/DVR, Jukebox, Picture Viewer and Game Station.