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I tried to get 2 laptops & a desktop pc running a Ubuntu home network & although i spent hours & hours reading tutorials on it, I couldn't get it to work.

I only have a small network & found ubuntu installed differently on each machine. Sometimes it would boot great, twice as fast as any Windows machine, then out of the blue it would stop working.

Ubuntu is a cracking OS that makes sense in a lot of ways but i think it takes a massive step back from a windows based system. Maybe i am so used to pointing & clicking to get where i need to!!

I attempted to use MythBuntu / MythTV on my desktop to control my movie/tv collection. I have read it was able to handle this better than VMC but again i was left scratching my head. Myth would be very good if you used it solely for PVR duties. It uses a back end/front end database OS on one machine (server) then a front end only (thin client / extender) at the display end.

Don't rule them out just because i have had a bad time of it. We use Red Hat at work so kind of know my way around Linux a little bit.

Hope someone else tries Ubuntu or Myth & reports back.

I hear what your saying.
I tried to do what you did once, with a couple of test pc's but could not gain satisfactory results time after time. Something new as a problem would always crop up. (hang on a minute, i'm getting that with windows too)
They do warn at the start linux is only suitable for people who are willing to spend time on it and I'm not.
I really hope you find a solution and if you do I hope you can write a good turtorial for people who want to give it a crack.

Well I'm now a Ubuntu man

Got 10.10 installed as a dual boot on my laptop for the purposes of easily running a test server for web design etc and with Wine installed it allows PC apps such as Photoshop to run in Ubuntu. In 5 weeks I haven't needed to boot into Windows once.

The dual boot was just a case of running the Pendrive software and setting it to install alongside my current Windows install.

I only tried Ubuntu when we we're training for the APC in Naga. It works for me just , specially since it can detect unwanted files in a flash drive that will be otherwise ignored in Windows.