Combined Backend, Frontend, & Regular Desktop
A backend/frontend/desktop installation is typical for someone wanting to add MythTV to an existing installation of Ubuntu or wanting a complete MythTV setup in a fully-featured desktop environment. If this setup is intended for a fair amount of recording, it will likely need to remain on at all times. The machine will do all of the scheduling, recording, commercial flagging and such in the background, while normal computing activities or tv viewing occurs in the foreground. If you were to compare this to a similar machine in the MS world, most MS MCE machines are of this nature. If you opt for this installation, be sure to chose a tuner card that includes hardware encoding- unless you will be using a DVB card receiving compressed streams. A large-capacity hard drive (100+GB) is also strongly recommended for a lot of recording activity or HD. Of all the installations, this will be the most taxing on the system as a whole, so plan/build accordingly.