Strav's blog

The Jetway MiniTop is a very small form factor mini computer.  At the price points I was able to get it, it was a great buy and makes for a very competent MythTV frontend.  The fan can get a little loud but other than that minor issue, it's a fantastic unit and relatively cheap.  

There are a few quirks with it.  The built in remote control does not seem to work with LIRC.  Some kind soul came up with a linux Generic HID Remote Driver that makes it work however.

[LINUX] Generic HID Remote Driver for XBMC (Drivers for XBMC on Linux and XBMC Live)

The HDMI Audio is a bit fussy as well.  In addition to the initial setup from the links below, for some reason, most of the time when the system restarts, I need to run the MythTV Audio Setup to get audio to work.

hdmi audio works only with aplay -D
ALSA DigitalOut
ALSA Dmix

Being primarily a Linux user, I'm used to the GNU tar program with gzip included. UNIX tar (at least HP-UX) doesn't have gzip included as part of the tar option set. Here's how to do a tar+gzip as a single command:

tar cvf - . | gzip > ~/backup-020916.tar.gz