I collect things, videos, audio files, documents, images. Managing my collections is always something that is time consuming and tedious.

About two years ago I first started playing with Freevo. I was impressed, and started building up fxd files with loads of info about all my media. I figured i’d keep the work from then and build upon it, building a full blown media PC running Freevo.

The hardware:
Dual Core AMD 64bit
1 gig RAM
80 gig SATA Seagate Disk
CD/DVD-R
cx88 based TV Tuner

First attempt at getting this off the ground was with the 64 bit version of Ubuntu.. Which as ubuntu often does, frustrated me to no end.

Moving past this I stuck in FreevoLive, based on Mandriva. I gave up on Mandrake at version 10, before the Mandriva thing happened… the Live based distro based on Mandriva’s live thingie reminded me why I don’t like it. Package management is horrible (i’m a Gentoo user, and Debian on my production servers, so most package management annoys me. Hail mighty apt, praise thee, emerge.)

enter OpenSUSE, stage left

The install is neat, flexible, but unobtrusive. It has been one of the most enjoyable new distro installs i’ve used in along time. I’m installing 10.3 - I had the media handy.

The install timed out a fair bit on package and repository info; but my internet connection has been a little flakey the last few days. Manually having to retry when it did meant the install wasn’t entirely unattended for the most part.

No Gnome.

People who know me know that I like feet. Thats all feet except for the Gnome-foot, and the rest of Gnome in general. The ones made of clay with red hats are however quite nice to have around. So I selected xfce in the install. xfce is a good compromise - i’ve just gone back to IceWM on my primary desktop.

The default login picked fvwm for me… ehh. shrugs.

Thats where I am now… I’ve added the 3rd-party Packman repository, the package management system has let me pick freevo and the bits I want… I’m about to configure the TV Tuner… wish me luck…