[Cialug] Linux Nettops?

[David Champion]

Depends a lot on what you want to do with it. If you're planning to either 
watch full screen flash, or play back full HD (1080p) video, you want to 
make sure you have the horespower to do so.

There are a few set-top boxes out now with the nVidia Ion chipset that may 
do the job. I have not used them myself.

I have a PC with an AMD 4400+ X2 processor (2ghz), 2gb RAM, nVidia 8800 
GTO card. Not cutting edge hardware, but pretty fast.

Running Linux, it is not quite able to run Hulu or Youtube video at 
1080p without a little bit of stutter. Other video (xvid etc) plays back 
at full HD just fine. I mostly run WinXP on it, for watching Hulu and 
stuff. I believe that Flash is to blame for the Linux stutter issues.

I also have Boxee (for WinXP) installed. So far I'm not very impressed 
with it - when you watch TV content from WB, for instance, Boxee overlays 
its own vcr buttons and status bar on the player. The pause / play just 
kinda work. You can pretty much forget skipping forward or back. It also 
seems to have to pause more often to cache content than when I'm watching 
content on Hulu.

There are a number of dedicated settop boxes, like Slingbox, and now a 
Boxee box (I assume it works just like the Boxee experience above).

I'd be interested in hearing other people's real world experience with 
this kind of thing as well... I think

-dc

Original Message:
---------------------
Does anyone have any recommendations for a nettop with an optical drive of 
any sort that is either preloaded with Linux, or works well with Linux?

-Jon