The KuroBox finally gave up the ghost and wouldn’t boot after a recent Debian update. I didn’t have the will to go through rebuilding it from scratch again, so invested in something a bit more modern. Something that has a GUI output even when you screw up a kernel upgrade! I’d had my eye on a Atom/ION system for a while and ended up getting a Zotac HD-ID11.

It was a very simple to get up and running with Ubuntu, XBMC and Mythtv.

NB – you could fry both your television and your PC doing any of this. Be careful, check, check and triple check everything before plugging it in. That said I haven’t had any problems for several months now, but check all your connections and soldering for shorts before plugging it all together.

Update 17/10/2012: some more details in a follow up post.

HDMI into SCART doesn’t go

Only having an old CRT TV means that connection options are pretty limited, with the only useful once being SCART. The TV does accept RGB, which makes life easier. You may think that the easy option would be to get a new TV, but that’s not nearly as much fun 😉

All the Atom/ION boxes have generally HDMI and DVI/VGA outputs. In the case of the HD-ID11, it has HDMI and DVI connections.
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