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Apart from pointing to the Wiki (easy answer) you could try to see whether it simply can't understand your video setup.  That happened to me with a nForce 630a and it's onboard Nvidia 7050 card.  Try, before booting, to specify VGA in safe mode.  Those beeping noises are the AVWizard, try pressing left shift for a a couple of seconds, and it may just display it for you.  Go for the most basic of settings, that might help you along.  Otherwise, press ALT-F2 or so, to get into a text console.

Kudos for guys like gaslang, because I started this project to save energy, not spend it.  That's why I equipped my machine with a AMD 2350 processor, it should run at only 60W.  My TV uses only 90W (my old one consumed 130W) and 1W in standby mode.  Other things one could do: use solar panels to power the pc (http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/06/technical_foundations_diy_solar_powered_pc/) power down disks, use USB boot disk, underclocking, putting the pc in your living room so the heat is used by people, use onboard video, and numerous others.  That solar power pc project described shows that this LinuxMCE can be a carbon neutral machine (disregarding manufacture) to exploit.  One thing that will improve here: my daugther would leave my old XP 2400+ machine on to just charge her IPod Shuttle :-(

The only thing I'm concerned about: that machine will run DHCP for all machines in the house.  This means that it has to be on, at least when the DHCP lease expires.  I'm not sure that a DHCP broadcast would ever be able to wake a machine up.  Any ideas?  My router has DHCP, but obviously won't help, as we need to offer BOOTP to geet the MD's to boot.  But if I can fix that some other way (only use orbiters on these Windows based machines, use other players to just use shared media on the core) I will probably choose for that.

What a laugh to see that MSI thinks it will only support WinXP http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=MEGA_180&class=mega
Anyhow, some things you did not tell are how large a hard disk is in the Mega 180, and whether you did get the TV tuner card that was optional at the time.  But apart from that, if it was my machine, and I'd like to preserve what's on the hard disk (winXP with all sorts of nice software and drivers set up possibly), I'd make a ghost image of it using Acronis or similar and then go ahead.  The fact that it is from 2004 is actually a plus, because most hardware is already supported in the latest kernels.  The only stuff that's not going to work without programming is most likely that snazzy front panel, but one could figure that out as well.  So, looks like this machine should be able to run core/hybrid LinuxMCE, or could be upgraded to do that (max 2Gb mem, which is cheap nowadays, hard disk can be replcaed with larger ones, CPU is going to be a bit harder to upgrade, but still available)  For the rest, sounds like you have all you need to get going.  Wish I had such a machine lying around, I built one from scratch using the latest and yet unsupported...

So, what do you have to loose?  Investing some time may render a nice hybrid / core LinuxMCE, otherwise an idle machine never been used is gathering dust.  I'd say: go4it.

One case to consider is the Point of View M Station.  I bought it for €38.-  It's too large for you, but it's cheap.  No PSU.

Hmmm... well I am afraid installing updated nVidia drivers was probably not a very good idea. You need to install to a 'clean' Kubuntu 7.04 installation.

I did that, then updated the driver to make the system accessible in the first place.  That was the only change I did to the Kubuntu 7.04 clean install.  Do you mean that the latest Nvidia drivers will be no good with LMCE 0704 then?

Btw, I have done the DVD quick installer as well as the Kubuntu 0704 + 2 CD LMCE 0704 install, and must have done it 10 times this week as well 

I haven't done the Xorg.conf tweaking yet, I'm into a LMCE unrelated non profit free software project as well, so I'm doing this in between.  Will keep you posted.  Can't wait for 0710 which will obviously fix everything and then some :-)

OK, latest progress is that once I switched to the second HDMI input on my TV, I saw a vertically stretched out image of the Kubuntu logo, so, after pressing shift I got into the AVWizard somehow.  That HDMI mode was never active before, so that's the one good thing LinuxMCE did.  And it's of course a new TV as well, so getting to know it also takes some experimenting.

Stiull not working as it should though.  720p is the mode that seems to work, however:
- movies don't play, only a black frame is shown together with sound coming through.  The video tests show that there's something wrong there.  Will doublecheck the NVidia driver version, but I did envy -t again after installing LinuxMCE.
- Underscan in this mode as some elements of the screen do not show (incomplete buttons)  This after I tried to adjust properly.
- When shutting down the TV goes partially out of sync, indicating that maybe frequencies are too high
- I am now going to get into Xorg.config to enter the stuff manually from my TV manual, like horiz /vert frequencies, maybe that will work.  At least I am back in control, as it was rather frustrating reinstalling everything again just to be able to log in again.
- There's at least one big mistake in my config: the dimensions for my TV are given as being more than a meter wide, which it isn't.  This results in very small fontsize on the logon screen when looking at PC mode.

@totallymaxed: I installed a proper Nvidia driver first, then used LinuxMCE 0704 from the two downloaded images.  Beats me why that should upset everything again.  Looks like the installer script overwrites everything.  Why does AVWizard not run in the current mode (from before LinuxMCE is installed) before upsetting everything by trying to start a videomode which does not work on a rather large percentage of configurations?  Why not be able to run AVWizard in PC mode (well I haven't tried it yet, may even work, but as the reboot upsets everything, that's little help)

Another tip for the developers would be to eject the CD from the drive when the second DVD is needed, rather than to depend on the user being able eject it from the drive, would be a plus: during constructiuon of my PC my SATA DVD drive did not work at first, so I connected a PATA DVD player temporarily.  Pushing the eject button had no effect for some reason (no h/w error, it works normally).   Going to the DVD image button on the desktop and choosing eject only resulted in a "mounted" error message.  On the SATA drive, the eject button works. 

So, thanks for your answers, I at least back on track.  Still need a lot to do, like Xorg, then IR, solving some out of disk space as soon as I rip a DVD, preventing all these messages indicating new shares being found etc.  But solving the blank screens that show up on the latest and greatest hw setups is one of LinuxMCE's great challenges IMHO.  Having no clue how to get in, but to find that somewhere in a forum is no help either.

Hi,

My h/w: Nvidia 7050 / 630a setup with a Sony KDL-26P3000E LCD TV.  This TV supports 1024 X 768 X 60Hz and 1280 X 768 on the VGA port.  While booting it shows the Kubuntu logo.

After having a Kubuntu 0704 base installation, and proving that the NVidia driver is working by changing resolution to 1280 X 768 and checking driver properties, I installed LinuxMCE 0704 from CD's.  All went well, until the reboot, because after reboot, I see the Kubuntu logo, then during that picture, I hear a descending series of beeps (note, there was not an ascending series of beeps!) and then the signal to my TV goes out of sync, and that's it.

I can connect to the DCERouter setup web page, but as I have not run AVWizard successfully, there seems to be no way to tell this stupid wizard to not drive my LCD into a mode it does not support.

Pressing SHIFT during boot does not help, as I don't hear it monitoring it, and pressing 2,7, in sequence to force it to 1024 X 768 over the VGA port has no effect at all.  I have now been battling with this for a week, so I thought it would be a good idea to ask for some help.  Yes, I read this first http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/AVWizard

Thanks for taking the time to explain how to get out of this maze.

Your Xorg configuration is not starting, because it is trying to drive a video card that's not available.  I found that out after rebooting and then first selecting another (safe) video mode.  You need to use the 2 CD distro, then use the techniques as in http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=3368.0

I have used Linux since 1993 (kernel 0.99 patch level 12) in various flavors, and X is still the biggest obstacle for Linux getting mainstream on the desktop.  Has nobody learned anything since OS/2, with it's minimal device drivers, have we not been able to hardware detect in such a way that this does not happen?  I fail to see progress and I am not totally Linux newbie, I am at the verge of giving up.

I do have it working now on my Sony 26P3000 LCD TV VGA port (still no sign of DVI support though), after reading and rereading the 1-2-3 method.  I still don't have the LinuxMCE cd's installed, only basic Kubuntu so far.

Let me know if you get it installed.