moved my htpc to raspberry pi... and back to "normal" pc

After using Raspberry Pi based HTPC with Raspbian for a while (see my previous posts) it was obvious that it hasn't made it for me. A few reasons:

• Trying to watch browser-based internet TV or just videos in the browser is too much hustle. It was much easier to connect my Mac and watch it.
• AirPlay is lagging on videos.
• Small one - for some reason it kept changing IP address on every reboot / power loss. There were more than a few. Btw, if you have your Raspberry Pi unstable, the first move definitely is to take a look at your PSU. It got much better for me when I changed PSU from a noname to iPhone charger. Google it before you buy.
• For me personally the combination with my receiver was not good: Pi supports HDMI starting version 2, but my receiver's "old" one from year 2008 and supports just 1.1 :D Sorry, no 5.1 sound with those beautiful Dolby Digitals, DTS's etc for me. I was thinking of buying external sound card, but, you know, why should I when I have some PC boards laying around the house having sound built-in with more "usual" connectors, like optical S/PDIF maybe?
• And, the most annoying one which was the final killer: user interface is too slow / lagging. I can't imagine why the distro can decode 1080p normally and can't do smooth user interface :| Especially, if you have a list of multimedia longer than one screen you wait for each next one, and next, and next...

I definitely could try to tune the thing or try other distros. Maybe I hoped that it will be more out-of-the-box initially. Maybe I'm not that much enthusiast or just too lazy :)

It definitely has the future, it just isn't here for me yet.

So, I'm back on my old good ASUS AT5IONT-I motherboard with pico-psu, 4GB of RAM, SSD for system disk. Good Ubuntu plus XBMC.

Some pics for the dessert.

Top view while still open

Open side view, wires

Top-front, open

Before attaching front grille

Assembled, with "monster" fan

Charger

Whole thing

Installed and running :)

moved my htpc to raspberry pi - couple of my answers to my own questions

Basically, there is no _practical_ WoL for the Raspberry Pi. It seem technically possible, at least they say that the NIC+USB chip HW supports it, but nobody f...ing needs it, so no project cares to make it. Everybody seem so happy about having a device consuming 5W max that leaving it on all the time seem more than normal even if it does productive work just a fraction of the time. Ok, let the time solve this, I'm happy too :)

Btw, there is WoL functionality for XBMC and their mobile remote. So, guys using it on the HW consuming tens of watts of energy, I encourage to try and to use it!

Cool feature of XBMC, Apple's AirPlay protocol, doesn't seem to work stable on Raspbmc. First, I was surprised by the functionality, you can't put the screen on the screen, you can just share photos, videos, music. Second, video is _very_ unstable and there are screen stretching issues which doesn't seem trivial to solve, you need to really dig into configuring the thing. I do not recommend it for now.

Btw, I had 1 Raspbmc crash since start, it just stopped to play internet radio once without obvious reason.

Otherwise, I'm still very happy with it.