Having got my hands on a barebones system I thought I would replace my much missed Media Centre. Not wanting to fork out for a Media Center version of Windows ( XP MCE or Vista Home Premium) I thought I would give LinuxMCE a go.

Frankly it's reaching the point where I'm about to get my wallet out. Before going any further, it should be pointed out that LinuxMCE is still in beta and shouldn't be regarded as a finished product. Then again, the Wine project has now been going 13 years and has yet to actually release version 1.

Installation of Linux MCE is a little convoluted. First you must install Ubuntu 6.10 and then download a second CD image to install the Media Center componants. Remember at this point I was still thinking that I was going to save around £250 and that's worth a certain amount of hassle.

Once the installation had finished Linux MCE seemed extremely slow, but I persisted and tried to set up the TV card. I had checked and it was explicitly listed as supported. Although supported, it couldn't be set up with the Linux MCE wizard so I had to find the MythTV setup.

Once I'd found that, I was presented with a large number of arcane options. Now, I've some experience with Linux so they didn't come as too much of a surprise but I couldn't recommend playing with these options to anyone who is used to Windows.

Finally I got the settings in such a way that Linux MCE found some channels but nothing I could do would actually make them play on the screen. I was already late from lunch so I gave up.

So the future is not looking good for Linux MCE, especially as I received a press release from Hauppague about a new release of their TV software that would work with the copy of Windows I could install on the computer. Sadly it arrived just as I was wiping Windows to make way for LinuxMCE. What irony!