You do not need to install another operating system or boot your system from another drive to use a media center. Windows Vista added Media Center capability with the Home Premium version, and users thought that the only option to have a media center is to run this version of Vista. This is not true. In your Linux box you can install MythTV and have the same (in fact more) functionality.
Installation should be fairly easy for OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS and Mandriva (and even Mac OS X). You can check from this page. Ubuntu users can go to Synaptic and check MythTV to be installed.
After the installation you have to undertake some configuration. Considering that the combination of computer hardware is infinite, we suggest you to take a look at MythTV’s user guide before getting going. MythTV is a system where you must pay attention to the details and make sure that everything is working. For example, check your sound card configuration from the program’s main menu and listen to one audio file to make sure than your card is properly recognized by MythTV. Or, check that you have your TV card recognized and configured by your Linux distribution before going on to the MythTV configuration. But, if your hardware is OK, by any means, then you do not have much to worry about; you can expect everything to work out of the box.
When all is clear, you will recognize that MythTV has additional functionalities compared to other media centers. One is digital video recording (DVR for short). In fact MythTV was started as a DVR application for Linux and then evolved in time and became a complete media center application suite. The DVR functionality is not limited to recording something from the TV card. You can stop, rewind, pause and record TV streams, as well as make scheduled recordings. Plus, depending on your hardware, you can encode your streams on the fly and save them on your hard disk in XViD format. If you have digital channel guide in your country, you will love the “fix scheduling conflicts.”
Next: MythTV extensions that make it a real media center and our opinion.