Yay! The parts have turned up for my media box. I’m building a machine to sit next to the TV and Hi-Fi, solely to store and play music and video. At some point I’ll add a Digital TV card so the machine can do TiVo like duties for us.

Anyway, here’s what I ordered:

• VIA EPIA MII 12000 Mini-ITX Mainboard
• 512Mb Crucial DDR RAM
• Travla C137 Case with 120W PSU
• Seagate 7200.7 200Gb HD
• Panasonic Slimline slotload DVD/CDRW drive

The mainboard has everything I need on it, plus a couple of bonuses. A CompactFlash slot means I could get it booting off a memory card instead of harddisk, possibly speeding everything up and making it more of a ‘switch on and off’ device. A PC-Card slot means I can add a wireless card at some point (to avoid wires and keep the other half happy!).

I intend to run the whole thing on GNU/Linux, probably Ubuntu given my recent good experience with it. I’ll post more later, possibly with pictures!