[Ablack86]

Alright so earlier this year I bought my friends Gateway 450SX4 off him for about 50$. The motherboard's video card was fried, and was causing the lcd to "wig out" I bought a board on ebay for 120$ and now have a perfectly good laptop (minus battery) for about 175$. The thing is I put so much time into the thing I do not want to sell it on ebay for a 200$ profit. I want to use this baby! I already have a laptop I use for work/school, and a few desktops that I use for gaming and other home stuff.

My question is, what the heck should I do with this guy??? I was thinking about turning it into a mobile media center. This would be great for car trips etc. Now to do this I would deffinently need to solve my "no battery problem"

Does anyone have a mobile media center? What sort of software is it running? What should I use to rip and compress dvds to this guy, as storage will be a concern?What other things should I take into consideration???
If not a "Mobile media center" then what? I am open to any and all suggestions, and am dieing to find a use for this laptop!

Specs
Pentium 4 M 1.8GHZ
512MB PC2700 (I think 2700 I could be wrong)
40GB HDD (My main concern if I will turn this into my mobile media center, besides battery of course)
ATI Radeon Mobility (I don't know the exact G Card, as I'm at work, but it is deffinently not a very powerful one.)

Thanks for any input!!!!!

-Andy

[gotrootdude]

GeexBox to the rescue: http://geexbox.org/en/index.html

6 megs, can possibly boot from a USB key.

[Ablack86]

GAh! I forgot to mention the laptop does NOT have a dvd player. My plan is to rip MY dvd's using my desktops dvd burner, then transferring them over the network. I dont think geezbox would be a viable solution for this??? Or would it??? I'll do a little research

[gotrootdude]

GeexBox can mount a NFS volume, with a bit of customization. It can also stream multimedia from your PC, It should be perfect for this.

[Ablack86]

So could I use something like DVD Shrink to compress dvd's on my Desktop. Then transfer the compressed files over my network to the laptop? I'm fairly familiar with a few of the "easy to use" linux distros (SUSE KUBUNTU etc.) and I know that for them to access ntfs shares can be quite a struggle. I've been searching around their site and can't really tell what they do support don't support etc. Could ya fill me in a bit here? TY!

-Andy

[gotrootdude]

OK, Geexbox has a custom ISO generator available for download. You need to download the one for PC and run it on your windows machine. It will give you the options of what codecs to install, etc.

Here's a link: http://geexbox.mirrorgeek.com/releas....7.i386.tar.gz

After unzipping and running the installer, you'll need to specify your windows network share if you want to play files from your windows machine, under the "Services" tab of the generator.

You will also need to set your network options.

Last click on Packages, and expand codecs. You'll need to make sure the box next to each codec option is checked. Then build your ISO and burn to a CD for installation on the lappy.

DVD's are quite simple. If it's unencrypted, just copy the .vob file over to your geexbox and play it (To transfer media to your GeexBox from windows, you'll need to use a FTP client on the windows machine to log into the Geekbox and transfer the files. The ftp server allows anonymous login. Make sure you upload files to the /mnt/<your_drive> folder, and not to the root, as this is a ramdisk. ) , or just play it from the windows machine over the network. Any media that you specified codecs for will play, along with the default supported formats for geexbox:

* MPEG 1/2 movies (MPG files, VCDs, DVDs ...)
* MPEG 4 movies (DivX, XviD, H.264 ...)
* RealMedia and Windows Media movies.
* OggMedia streams
* Matroska streams
* Audio streams like : MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, WAV (AudioCD), AC3, MusePack (MPC), FLAC ...
* Network streams : WebRadio and WebTV
* Watching analog TV and digital DVB (with appropriate tuner cards)

Use Google to find a appropiate FTP client that you like, not all are simple to use, but most are self explanatory. Just enter the IP of GeekBox and leave the other settings alone, then click connect. Browse to the right folders, then just click and drag the files over.


To install GeekBox to your Hard Drive from the generated and burned CD ISO, follow the instructions here:
http://geexbox.org/en/doc.html#installator