PUBLIC MARKS from multilinko with tag tv

While their beautiful colleagues work in fantastic surroundings, Jen, Roy and Moss lurk below ground, scorned and mocked by their co-workers as geeky losers, doomed never to make it back into normal society.

I'm almost done loading up a new Gentoo installation paired with MythTV and a hardware MPEG2 encoder. I'm looking forward to finishing but before I let it loose upon my television, I was wondering what else I should compile in. Samba File sharing? A webserver (for watching shows on the road)? A CPU/Memory monitor? An additional media player? Not to start a flamewar, but should I do KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, or some other window manager (especially when viewed on a TV screen)? What bells and whistles can I add to make my system that much more complete?

While the design of the W2600 punches above its weight, the video performance is more indicative of its budget roots. The torture test for any LCD is giving it a plain old analogue TV signal and then finishing it off with some Freeview programming, and with these odds Dell's effort didn't fare too well. The 25ms response time just isn't fast enough to deal with swift camera pans and moving images, and the 500:1 contrast ratio can't reproduce any detail when you're viewing a dimly lit movie. These sort of problems will affect the viewing pleasure of even the most undemanding viewer, so if you've got your heart set on an LCD, you'll have to spend up to £1,000 more to bag something comparable to a CRT from low-quality sources.