Computers in the Livingroom

I've decided I hate computers in livingrooms. Beige boxes and monitors on desks just don't belong. Up until last weekend, a small "office" had been growing in the corner of our livingroom. I finally got around to moving the ugly little Ikea desk with the awkwardly large CRT monitor on top of it into into the second bedroom, which is now my new office. In their place is a small end table with a lamp and an futon chair. Much better looking, even though I want to replace both the lamp and the chair with better furniture.

For better or worse, there still aren't any less computers in the livingroom. My Linux desktop machine has been hidden underneath the TV to live as a MythTV PVR. I've also moved my 486 firewall/webserver/mailserver behind the couch, although that can easily be moved into the new office as well. The way the computers are positioned, fan noise isn't terribly loud unless MythTV is recording something. The 20 year old fridge in the kitchen masks any computer anywhere in the apartment when it's running, which seems to be most of the time... I'm still thinking of building a cheap, silent system to use as a dedicated MythTV frontend, and moving the backend server out of there.

The geekiest fun I had was setting up a workstation in the new office though. A few years back I installed RedHat 7.2 on Kerry's old P2 machine. A bit of hacking has cut bootup times in half (with more to come!) and turned it into a very nice X terminal that I can use to log on to the machine in the livingroom using XDMCP. That should give me enough tweaking to do until I go and buy the Mac Mini I've been drooling over.

• Tags:
• mythtv
• home office
• xdmcp
• linux
• silence