After watching movies on the 13″ for a couple of years I got meself a Samsung. Not the grotesque wallpaper sized one but still pretty ok-large. So how and what do I feed it with? Mini-DVI+the great free media center Plex seemed like a reasonable setup for a while. If you want to chain your laptop to the TV set or using a MacMini, that is.

So I went fishing for a cheap setup for my new (HD-)TV needs. Since I consume at least 10 hours worth of podcasting every week there was a small chance I would run across something useful. And then the FLOSS Weekly guys interviewed the project manager for Amahi Home Server.

Quick look:

• YES – Home server running on Fedora Linux
• YES – App-store-ish way of installing applications with one-click (mentioned probaby 100 times in Floss weekly episode 112)
• YES – Built-in and preconfigured VPN and Samba shares
• NO – Replacement of Media center or media streamer
  You still need something that connects to your TV or projector. I chose the reasonably priced Western Digital WD TV Live HD.
• NO – plug-and-play.
  Though this is marketed as a quick and easy solution you still need some basic knowledge not to mention interest in Linux to get it working properly. Example, even if you’ve partitioned or mounted a hard drive in Windows or Mac before it’s still not quite the same with Fedora. That said you get a lot of help with the setup from the excellent installation guide provided by Amahi.

But when I got it running it’s doing just fine. I’ll post some quick terminal guide how-tos of things I had to do in order to mount drives, autologin on boot etc.