So I've been using my media player without any kind of front end as-is for a while now. I've got a length of CAT-5E going under my rug connected to my main PC utilizing it as a pseudo-server.
I've had a copy of XP that I whittled down using nLite that I wanted to test on this. I'd merged the drivers in so basically all I'd have to do (in theory) was just pop a new hard drive in (in case things went south I didn't want to screw with my original installation), pop the installation CD in, and walk away.
Well...as we all know, the best laid plans...
Two hard drives hooked up...neither one would be detected by the BIOS. I have no idea why. I tried different cables, different configurations (master/slave/CS) with no luck. I know the drives work okay because I literally just pulled them from my existing PC. So unfortunately I was forced to use the one in the PC already.
Popped in my nLite CD. Got to the point where it's supposed to load the PCMCIA drivers...and it failed. Since I'd removed them it balked. Crap. Started from scratch and made a new nLite CD.
Once Windows installed (which I had to help it along several times, despite having completed those particular sections in the nLite setup) I was having difficulties with video. It was defaulting to 640x480x8 bit color. The resolution was fine, but the color was not. But every time I went to change it, the screen would blank and the computer would lock up. Bah.
Thought it might be a driver issue. Since the video card is just a Riva TNT2 card, I was using nVidia's generic drivers. But it's an Asus AGP-3800, so I downloaded their "official" drivers. No luck. I tried it hooked up to a POS VGA monitor so I could see if there was anything going on I couldn't see on the TV. Nope.
Finally had an idea: maybe XP just doesn't like this video card. I had another AGP-3800 lying around. Swapped it out...presto, perfect picture and the PC doesn't lock up!
Now for the front end...either xLobby or Media Portal. Both require the use of the .NET framework, and I haven't been able to get it to install thus far. I'm guessing it has to do with the lack of RAM (a whopping 80-ish megs). I thought I had more RAM I could use in this beastie, but alas, I appear to be out. I have a request on FreeCycle...hopefully someone will come thru.