Raspberry Pi Media Centre

The networking division of Lamas Design has been muttering about the fact that the TV in the kitchen does not allow him to connect to our film library.  The main TV has an ethernet connection and he has a playstation in his mancave, which allows him access.  So while he is cooking dinner he is limited to just the cable box offerings.  (Oh Bless!)

He was given an idea by a friend that using a Raspberry  Pi box would allow him to do this. 

We purchased the necessary kit, put it together and booted up.

The SD card that it came with, contained "Raspbian Weezey".  This appeared very much like a commonly available desktop, with web browser and so on.  Neither of us have much Linux knowledge.
 
We had a look around on the web and found that to use it as a media server we would be better off using either Raspbmc or Rasplex.  
Again I state that neither of us have much Linux knowledge.

I found a tutorial for installing Raspbmc, so that is the one we went with. At this point Mr Network was not interested and kept telling me "I have no idea what I am doing"  (haha he thought I did?!) And he wandered off.

Once the SD card had been updated to Raspbmc and had sorted out its installation and rebooted a few times, and was showing a screen which proclaimed :
Music                   Videos                 Photographs           Settings
my services, it seemed, were no longer needed as it was now all interesting again!!
Some time later, I was ushered into the kitchen to find that the kitchen tv was now displaying the film library and all the music and photos from the network.  

This was very simple to put together, very reasonable price, and easy to get going.  And finally, just in case the point was missed earlier, we had little Linux knowledge, but now I think that is changing.