mfwic-o-rama

Recently, I returned to experimenting with a Home Theater PC (HTPC). One of the things I changed is the OS. I have Win98SE but wanted to try some flavor of Linux. LiveCD distro's look appealing for a try-before-buy so that's where I started. I found a list of LiveCD distro's at Frozen Tech. One of the first things I noticed is that you can sort the list according to several criteria, one of which is "Primary Function". There happens to be a "Home Entertainment" category so I chose that subset. It yielded a list of 11 Linux distro's that are stripped down to just the packages that are needed to run a HTPC. This reminded me of the last post Vanderpool, OSX and Jobs. Already there is a ecosystem of OS's that are targeted at specific functions and don't bring the baggage of a general-purpose distro. If I had a machine running virtual machines ala Vanderpool et al. then I could run the HTPC software much more reliably, which is a must-have for any consumer electronic functions.
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