Piece by piece I've been improving my home setup consisting of a laptop(mac), desktop(linux) and small server(fit-pc w/ linux). I'm fairly happy with what I've got now. Not only does the small server run '''trac/svn/lighttpd+php''' for development, it also serves as a backup server through a few '''rsync''' scripts running over ssh and a torrent downloader via '''rtorrent'''.

Once the linux wlan drivers support master mode, I can also use the box as a WLAN access point, getting rid of one more appliance.

One very pleasant thing I just accomplished was setting Pulseaudio to run as a server. Now I can either play music via MPD or stream it directly from my desktop (and it's dead simple - I just pick the output sink with a few clicks). Reminds me of the streaming support in apple airport stations, which I always thought was cool. Of course Pulseaudio does this and a lot, lot more.

Now I'm just waiting for the Android phones to hit Finland.. then my - by then self-aware - home audio system will be complete (except for obvious bits, like good speakers and a decent amplifier)..

After all the struggling, my final solution is to have Vista on one 50GB partition and Linux on the rest. No damn MediaDirect bloatware anymore.

My home key now boots into windows and my normal powerkey into GRUB and linux. Just perfect :).

Huge thanks to "Mario666" for his howto on notebookreview forums.

Just remember to run the command line in Vista as Administrator (right click the icon in the start menu). Otherwise the rmbr.exe command will just throw a useless error.

Dell Media direct proved out to be a Windows CE Embedded system with a simple media GUI. Not really useful, since it only reads FAT-drives and has no network connection.

Since it's a windows system, it only took me two minutes to break it and start ending up with a blue screen of death on each MD bootup (I honestly didn't do anything wrong.. just used it, it hanged and then I had to hard boot..).

I've been thinking about replacing the system with a quick'n'small linux distro with something like Elisa starting up instantly, so I did some research and it seems that starting with the home button starts the MBR, while the normal start button fires up the active partition (you can only have one).

Unfortunately if I install GRUB on the linux partitions start and mark it active, vista hijacks the boot flag to its own partition. So now I have GRUB on MBR and MD still works.. for now.

** Quick how to fix your broken MD Howto **

This is what I did to fix the blue screen of MD death

1. Get the Dell MD recovery disk and follow the instructions
2. After this I ended up with a broken windows install, so insert the vista CD and do the repair bit that comes after you choose the language.
3. Insert your flavor of live CD linux (I used Puppy and I heartily recommend it)
4. Install grub to your MBR with grub-install /dev/sda

I guess I'll look into replacing the MD with a linux distro at some point. I found a howto on it, but I really want to: - press the power button to enter grub to choose between "the main linux" and vista - press home to boot a quick, small linux for media stuff

If you've already succeeded or are interested in the same thing send me a mail at lauriATsokkeloDOTnet

To save the pain from others of repeating my mistakes, I'll write this short howto. In the end you should have a working system with Ubuntu, Vista and Dell MediaDirect.

1. Boot using Mediadirect CD, choose the second option and allocate how much you want for Vista (I gave the beast 50GB)
2. Install Vista
3. Boot into Vista and insert the Mediadirect CD again. Finish MD installation
4. Insert your Linux CD, boot
5. Install your flavor of Linux (I used Ubuntu Studio) by creating new partitions in the empty second partition.

After this I had a working setup with a working Mediadirect button (I could press the home-button when the computer was off and boot straight into MD)