Linux: Pandora's Box

I won't take a lot screen real estate today, simply because I'm tired, and need to sleep.

I have to say that one of things I love and hate about Linux is the Pandora's Box effect it has on me. Whenever I decide that I'm going to do something, it always leads me into about 10 different other projects. Typically, these projects tend to snowball, and increase is scale and complexity until I'm about as deep inside the computer as possible, unsure where my flesh ends and the tenuous strands of copper begin.

Currently, I'm working on getting some kind of Media Center up and running, which is a daunting task. It's something I will say for Windows Media Center, it might be the most perfect thing ever, it certainly may be lacking in terms of some of the possibilities (home automation springs to mind), but I'll tell you that it is fairly simple and straight forward and requires very little work.

Counterparts under Linux do not have the same advantages. First, I've tried several different options that exist, Elisa, Freevo, and MythTV. I've given thought to Linux MCE, but it looks like it would be the most in depth in terms of configuration. Elisa is extremely simple, but seems to lack the ability to access my network shares, that or I'm just not smart enough to figure it out, and unfortunately, there seems to be no user documentation to speak of on the webs. Freevo looked very promising, but for some reason I can't get it to run at all, it didn't even give me the full gamut of option screens I was supposed to get during install. MythTV seems to run, I can get it to play DVD's with the options, and though MythTV seems like a silly option because I don't actually have a TV tuner yet, it certainly has all the feel of a Media Center.

The problem is that MythTV still doesn't see my network either. This is seeming like it must be something I'm doing wrong. Oddly, when I try to search out a solution online, it seems as though I'm the only one looking to access video over a network.

So, for the moment I'm stuck, and I've wasted plenty of time on this. It's a love / hate relationship I tell you.

Update: I sent an email to Garry Parker, who wrote a MythTV Ubuntu Installation Guide. His response made me feel really stupid, in that all I needed to do was mount the network shares, something I'd done many times before. I feel like a dummy.