10 ways Linux can breath life into your old PCs

Yesterday, I was trying to figure out what to do with a spare Athlon XP 1600+ box that I have. I wrote down some of my ideas and threw in some others I’ve used in the past. If you’re looking for ways to reuse that old PC, just peruse this list.

1. MythTV:

If you haven’t at least heard about MythTV, you’re missing out. For the uninitiated, you should probably try out Knoppmyth. You can spec out hardware a few ways with this, but for run of the mill SDTV, you can get by with older hardware via the use of hardware encoding/decoding. A Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 can handle the encode and decode operations just fine, even on slow hardware. Look at the EPIA C3 boxes for proof. a 1GHz C3 seems to be about the floating point equivalent of a Pentium III 500. You just need enough CPU power to write to/from the disk, and you’re set. A Hauppauge PVR-350 and a 500GB SATA drive should set you back about $250, and then you’re on your way to your own home-brew DVR!

Read more at I Can Has Linux