LinuxWorld Expo, Boston: Tyan Thunder K8WE, HP xw9300, Aries Media Center

Tyan was the only motherboard manufacturer at LWCE [LinuxWorld Conference and Exposition] (if you don’t count Intel), and had some demos of its new Opteron and socket 939 Athlon 64 motherboards. As mentioned above, the HP xw9300 uses Tyan’s Thunder K8WE (model s2895) as its backbone. It’s a 1U motherboard with four DIMM sockets per CPU, one 133MHz PCI-X slot and two 100MHz slots, and one standard 32-bit PCI slot in addition to the aforementioned dual x16 PCI Express slots.

The device we wanted most to take home (other than the HP xw9300) was a working prototype of the Aries Media Essential Media Center. It’s basically a set-top PC that looks like a slimline VCR, but actually houses an Nvidia nForce3-based microATX motherboard with a 64-bit AMD Sempron processor, an integrated 128MB Nvidia video card, 1GB RAM, a 200GB hard drive, and a slot-loaded CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. It had front-panel connectors for four USB devices and one FireWire device, and in the back it had another FireWire port in addition to S-Video and RCA outputs.

The Aries Media Center ran on Fedora Core 3 and used MythTV to perform a variety of tasks. A TV tuner was built in, and a Hauppauge remote control was included in the package. You can use this device as an MP3 player, digital video recorder, media storage device, and DVD player (a hardware MPEG-2 decoder is built in, so software decoders are not necessary). There’s even a neat feature that the manufacturer added to MythTV to allow viewers to see actor and show information for each TV show via the Internet Movie Database. There is no published release date for this device, but the prototype was impressive.

LINUXWORLD EXPO, BOSTON: The hardware side
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