LinuxBIOS and your TV? (was: motherboard for vdr system)

[Preston L. Bannister]

This is way too cool :).

  http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr

The fact this is built from off-the-shelf components is *very* interesting.

Click the remote to turn on your TV (and the attached computer) and the
first thing you see is the LinuxBIOS boot message.  Microsoft would be
delighted :).

The set-top box that came from my cable TV company is slow, and the
interface poorly designed.  Innovation is slow to non-existant.  It's bad
enough I'd considered ditching the service.

This flips things entirely around.  Ditch the floppy drive and the funky LED
interface.  Add a DVD or DVD-recorder drive, both for software reload (if
needed) and to play movies.  Connect the box to your home network.

Now you can control your recorder from anywhere in the house (or anywhere on
the Internet).  You can monitor and control the programs your kids watch :).

Fast boot is desirable.  Booting Linux from flash would be nice but not
essential, given you would have a hard disk.  You'd be looking to boot from
CD (for software reload) or hard disk.

Maybe the questions Alessio could have better asked would be:

  Which BIOS/boot loader would be most suitable?

and then:

  Which suitable small motherboard is supported and readily available?


( I too was unclear Alessio was asking :).

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Preston L. Bannister
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