No HDD Shuttle

[Thoku]

Hi all

I have a plan to build a shuttle which will not have a hdd or optical drives and I plan to boot it across the network (Linux obviously, probably either Linux MCE or Gentoo + Myth TV) and stream all the data from my server in another part of the house. I hope as much as possible to just use IR/bluetooth from a remote to control the system which should all be handled by the OS & applications.

I do however have a few h/w related questions for this project:
1. How much stress will network booting the OS put on the server? It is currently: AMD 3700+ and 2GB DDR2 RAM but I was thinking of upgrading it to a dual maybe quad core and 4GB RAM.
2. Could you recommend any good shuttle/set top box cases with IR in them and preferably bluetooth.
3. I know the shuttle will need 2GB of RAM min realistically but does it really need a dual core to network boot it?

Any thoughts on the questions and the project as a whole would be greatly appreciated.

[DanceswithUnix]

I would say network booting is easier on the server than media streaming, so you should be good to go on that.

Look up the Linux Terminal Server Project (ltsp.org) and the hardware mentioned by people is lower than your existing AMD chip despite acting as a server for thin clients (which is far harder work than your expected use).

Quad core would, I believe, give you 3 unused cores in this scenario

Me, well I was going to go down that route but in the end a 160GB Samsung drive was so quiet and so cheap (the PSU fan is way noisier) that I just ended up doing a normal Fedora + MythTV install.

[Thoku]

Thanks for the response.

I was hoping to go completely fanless for cooling to try and reduce the noise but I guess it depends on the CPU I end up using.