So recently I bit the bullet and abandoned my beloved Debian installation on WDHQ. This wasn’t because it did anything wrong by me, let me tell you. Debian still has a special place in my SysAdmin heart. Completely customizable, harsh but fair, and powerful. For top to bottom server deployment, I still think it’s the best out there. But in light of my recent purchase of a yum-cha 42″ Plasma for ~AU$500 and a set of Logitech z5500′s, I needed an OOB Media Centre solution. I had looked at many options such as Boxee, Elisa, MythTV and the like, and eventually settled on XBMC Live.
XBMC is beautiful. That’s the only way I can describe it. Everything works (including my Hauppage MCE Kit which refused to work under Debian+LIRC). It’s customisable with hundreds of plugins, and did I mention everything works? If you’re looking at building a media centre, look no further. Watching UFC on the big screen on the couch was worth losing my years-old Debian installation. R.I.P ye-olde WDHQ.
However, it wasn’t all smiles and roses. By leaving Debian I also ended up losing my VMWare Server 2 installation. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it to compile on any combination of kernel, sources or headers under XBMC. My thread on their forums was questions and debunked. Sometimes I really hate the fact people are allowed to have opinions other than mine…
Anyway, along comes VirtualBox! Again, straight out of the box with minimal configuration, VirtualBox OSE installed, started up and ran beautifully. Unfortunately it didn’t come with the handy web interface that VMWare Server 2 had. This was quickly solved though with the software phpVirtualBox. A simple unzip, configure of config.php and I was up and running with a lazy web interface for when you just can’t be stuffed messing with the CLI. I’ve since upgraded from VirtualBox OSE 3.x to VirtualBox 4.x with very little problems other than an upgrade of phpVirtualBox and some config tweaks.
So there you have it. You don’t have to depend on Debian for your hobby-server anymore! (we’ll just ignore the fact XBMC is running Ubuntu… 
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