Back in 2005, when I decided to build my Home Theater PC, only platform that I was familiar with were Windows. Actually, I considered myself (and I still do :) ) as a Windows power user, so the obvious choice for my HTPC's platform was XP. Well, to cut the long story short, that was a dead end. I won't argue here and I still think of Windows as the best desktop OS. Unfortunately, HTPC is a kind of machine where all the powers of Windows (intuitive, good looking and fast GUI, wizards for almost everything and other goodies) sooner or later gets clouded by its desktop-centric and mouse-oriented design pitfalls. Support for keyboard (and thus remote controller) navigation is horrible in both Windows as an OS as it is in most of the applications, scripting is virtually non-existent and most of the core operating system parts (which used to be perfectly fine in desktops environment) can not be even customized for HTPC operation. Try for example to add virtual mixer in audio settings - feature that is needed if you plan to run multiple applications at the same time, but to hear sound only from the one in the front. Not to mention that most of the Windows applications don't even support command line parameters and behave extremely buggy then run on any DPI settings other than default (unpopular "Large fonts" setting in Windows - we'll need that change to "zoom" user interface and make it viewable from distance of few meters). However, I didn't try Windows XP or Vista in MCE variant which may be different, although from what I've read about them, neither that breed of Windows wouldn't do any good to us.
Anyway, I left Windows XP on my personal laptop, got myself a Debian NetInstall CD and decided to learn how to setup my first Linux box.
And this time, it was all the way around - things that make Windows perfect desktop OS make this highly unconfigured but customizable Linux distribution a great choice for mostly automated HTPC jobs. Powerful Bash scripting capabilities coupled with literally thousands of small command-line utilities (that I've never missed on my Windows box, thanks for asking) ended up as the winning combination for the job.
So, yes, we'll be setting up a Linux box here. If you have any problems with that, quit now or shut up till the end of this tutorial :) And if I could spend countless nights trying to figure out what is that thing called "alsa" and why it won't output any sound to my S/PDIF connectors, you can at least try to follow this tutorial to the end. Of course, this is not Linux tutorial, so some basic knowledge of Linux is assumed. If you are Linux newbie, maybe better choice than Debian would be Ubuntu Linux - after all, it's based on Debian, but just a lot more initially polished, so anything said here should work the same way on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution. But no guaranties are made - I'm running Debian on my HTPC and can only confirm that it works.
