I get more excited the more I read and see about this upcoming game. They, of course, don’t have any of the big an exciting information yet; such as all the classes, races, etc, but just the couple of game play videos I’ve seen have me hoping this will be as fun as WoW has been.  I’m sure I’ll start out playing a Jedi on the Republic side of things, but could probably be persuaded to try out a red saber .

I guess this is probably why Linux will never make it in the mainstream desktop market.

I decided to move on to XBMC (Xbox Media Center).  I had previously had XBMC installed on an old XBOX that I had and really liked how it worked and played.  They had more recently come out with a version that would run on Linux so I figured it deserved a shot.  After playing with it for a bit I was somewhat satisfied with it, but it was still missing the Hulu plugin that I was hoping for as well.  This brought me to Boxee which is an extension of the XBMC project.

Boxee has a very nice UI and includes pretty much everything that I was looking for in my Media Center.  It will play Hulu as well as a number of other streaming content, has built in bittorrent and plays almost every format known (including ISOs).  The only thing that it doesn’t do currently is play Netflix, but I think there are some work arounds for it as well as they are working on solving that issue.

I had some difficult time getting the digital audio to work properly mostly due to issues with Linux (isn’t it always? ), but I think I have it mostly ironed out now.  I still can’t get the sound to work when I play an ISO file, but I’m sure I’ll get it figured out eventually and that isn’t deal breaking — yet.

I found this article where someone built a pretty decent set top box using boxee and a slim computer case that I might do as a second box for my bedroom.

Here is the middle pic:

The evil front porch in the middle of transition.

Here is the after pic:

This is the front porch after.