Last week I bought a MSI Wind netbook after finding a nice deal on the older U100 model. I bought the netbook for the primary purpose of using it as a “frontend” for the Perseus software defined receiver (SDR), which only functions under the Windows OS, but this is another story. When not serving as a Perseus frontend, the netbook will be used for general use when traveling, surfing on the couch, etc. For this reason I couldn’t resist setting up Ubuntu on it. Because there’s no optical drive on the netbook, I chose to boot Ubuntu 9.04 live from a USB flash drive using a utility called UNetbootin. After about six attempts, I finally got a good image onto the flash drive from which I could boot from. Ubuntu ran without a hitch, so I installed it without any issues. The three important things: wireless, touchpad, and the internal webcam work flawlessly for me on the U100 under Ubuntu 9.04. After loading it up with my favorite apps, I wondered how it would function as a MythTV frontend. From Synaptic, I installed mythtv-frontend (0.21), then opened a terminal and did a sudo dpkg-reconfigure mythtv-common to change the database password to that which matches my backend database. Success! It works! And without wires! Through myth-frontend, live HD content stutters a bit but live SD television comes through perfectly fine via 802.11g Below are some pictures of the U100 running as a wireless MythTV frontend, streaming live television from a Motorola 6200 cable box connected to the master backend:
