For the past few years, I've been considering installing Linux as a dual boot to ease what is likely to be my eventual abandonment of the Windows platform. This is primarily because I see Microsoft implementing increasingly rigorous policies restricting fair use rights. Sure, they like to call it "Digital Rights Management", but what it really means is taking away all your rights to back up your own disks. I started using computers back in the day of the Commodore 64, when it was explicitly stated that we had the right to make a backup of any game or program we bought. These days, I have toddlers that like to chew on my DVD's, so I always back them up to the hard drive. Anyway, as you might imagine, I firmly believe that users should have the right to back up anything they buy, or even make a backup CD of music, and play the backup until it wears out or gets scratched up. It looks like this sort of thing will become increasingly difficult in the future with Windows. Two of my friends and myself are at the point where we want to upgrade our systems. In reality, this means starting from scratch, because we've already reused many of the components from a previous build. We'll need new power supplies to power the new dual core CPU's. The 3 of us use our PC's 90% of the time as media centers. We record loads of programs from TV tuner cards, plus back up DVD's. I typically use Nero Recode to compress video to the h.264 format - at about 200 Megabytes per hour. I typically play it back using VLC Media player. My past tries at Linux have found it to be rather user unfriendly. 5 years ago, Red Hat Linux wouldn't even install properly. 3 years ago, Lindows (now Linspire - thanks Microsoft for your crappy lawsuits!) installed well and was easy to get started on, but didn't even come with a working media player. Installing programs was easy, but most of what was available was junk. Now I'm considering Ubuntu, just so we can try it out. I'd been looking at motherboards, and have pretty much settled on the AM2. I'm waiting until the Athlon 64 X2 5600+ drops in price a bit. I want the onboard Nvidia 6100 video or perhaps a similar ATI onboard solution. Then I noticed that some of the motherboards had HDMI, and wondered what the heck that meant. Further reading told me that these motherboards would be HDTV ready - so they could be plugged directly into an HDTV monitor. I'm not sure I really like the whole idea of HDMI. Isn't it a form of taking away consumer rights and making sure that certain content won't even play, or will play at a reduced quality if it isn't protected all the way from the player to the monitor? I usually use RCA jacks for all of my audio and video needs, and am not very trusting of HDMI, which is an expensive cable, and seems to be forced on everyone by hollywood. Could someone please tell me some more about HDMI, and whether it can be used as a form of DRM? I'm also interested in how HDMI relates to Linux, and whether I should actually buy a motherboard that has it onboard. Thanks!