Currently I have 2 laptops, a Dell Inspiron E1705 (80gb HD), and an Inspiron 7000 with a dead hard drive.

I have a backend set up on a separate desktop server running Gentoo, running mythtv 0.20

The E1705 is a dual core with broadcom wireless built in. Video driver is one of the newer Intels, I believe.

I have many wireless G cards for the Inspiron with Atheros, Broadcom and Prism54 chipsets. Video driver is ATi Rage Mobility Pro LT.

I can probably get an 80gb hard drive for the 7000 on eBay for about $50. But, it's really quiet without the hard drive

Basically, my question is, what is the advantage of using knoppmyth with frontend only booting off live CD then apt-getting up to 0.20 vs running knoppix 5.0.1 and doing the same vs. just making a linux partition on the laptops drives and putting, say, Fedora or Ubuntu on it with mythtv (obviously I can't do that on the 7000 until I get a new drive, but if I don't need a drive, why bother)?

There are several version numbers of .20. Cecils .20 debs are at least one .20 revision old. If you are running the latest .20 SVN from Gentoo, the knoppmyth live CD idea probably wont work. If you're just wanting to do a frontend with the latest .20 SVN, I'd recco grabbing Suse 10.1 (live cd if you wish) and get the mythtv RPMS from packman (http://packman.links2linux.org/). You'd be rolling in no time..

There is no quicker and easier way to get a MythTV based HTPC up and running than KnoppMyth. One cannot currently apt-get anything live from the CD.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Cecil, I see you're up late.

Agreed, knoppmyth is the easiest. No doubt about it. I was not attempting to point Rob away from knoppmyth, just tryting to meet his needs for .20, since ours isn't fully baked yet..