After my last MythTV box died, Eli BenShoshan, a former coworker of mine, pointed me at LixSystems, LLC. They make small, ultra quiet media center computers that are Linux-friendly. These things totally rock! Mine came yesterday, just in time for me to work on it this weekend.
Since my last box was completely toasted, I just started my MythTV installation over from scratch — abandoning all of my previously recorded material. I started by trying to boo the Gentoo install-amd64-2006.1 ISO — no luck. Some significant Google-time paid off, though. It turns out that the motherboard in my little system (an Asus M2NPV-VM) is missing a bug that some previous nVidia-based Asus boards exhibited. The work-around present in the Linux kernel created a race condition that caused the system to deadlock when booting. Whee!
So I used an older CD to boot, and just installed the 2006.1 stage3 tarball anyway. I wanted to use a 2.6.18 kernel, so I could use the 0.8 branch of IVTV. Before compiling, I applied a patch to circumvent the lack-of-bug problem with the nVidia chipset. Once I got the system to boot (and figured out how to compile a kernel that actually worked) the thing was up pretty quickly.