HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

You have a DVB card (Digital Video Broadcasting, for digital TV that is)? You want to use your computer as a telly for watching and recording? Yet MythTV is a bit of a too much bloat, too hard to set up, sumtin like that?

Me-TV offers a light and easy solution providing automatical scanning of the available channels, watching telly, EPG (Electronic Program Guide) and on top of everything, allows you to scedule programs to record on hard disk.

I used to watch TV via xine. I had to manually scan channels from the command line before that worked, xine supports DVB but no electronic program guide and other nice features. One of the main reasons to get jiggy with Me-TV was of course the possibility to schedule programs to record (which I have already used couple times and I only installed it like three days ago).

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Ok, first off I don’t usually write about Windows OS specifically and do not use it, nor have I even tested Windows 7 myself. That being said I decided that since this is a big issue for some I should make one of my exceptions.

If you are using Windows 7 beta then you know (at least you should) that it expires tomorrow (July 1, 2009) and after that it will annoyingly shut down your computer every two hours. Other than that it will function untill August 1, 2009 when the beta will expire completely.

Next step is to either return to your old Windows version or install upgrade to RC. Unfortunately Microsoft does not officially support upgrading from beta to RC (they recommend clean install) - however browsing the web I bumped into this guide at tomshardware.com that tells you how to do the upgrade (and if nothing goes wrong save you from the trouble of re-installing everything): Windows 7 Beta Begins to Expire July 1, 2009.
If you don’t want to read what tomshardware has to say about this, to just skip right into upgrade procedure guide go straight to Microsofts own document, “Delivering a quality upgrade experience” on their Engineering Windows 7 blog.

I just thought that it might be polite to post this here, just in case that some reader is in this particular situation, pondering how to upgrade his expiring Windows 7 beta (even if it’s just running on top of Linux+VirtualBox ;) ), so there.

P.S. Don’t expect that I will take a habit of writing about Windows, because I rarely will. Sometimes but rarely, as I see it this is mostly *nix (and specifically Linux) use and programming related blog :)