LinuxMCE was a disappointment of the last year for me. I tried it on intel based XC Cube (EA65) system with nvidia 5200 card and Videomate DVB-T300. All of these bits have linux drivers, I had gentoo with freevo on it before (which is not a bad solution to be honest, if suffering a little from stale development and lacking proper documentation in regard to DVB-T).
EA65 is in basic set of lirc modules, dvb-t card is standard and well supported in 2.6 kernel saa7134, I also had ATI Remote Wonder with USB on standby should both system and tv card remote caused any trouble. After installing LinuxMCE (via 2 CD on top of Kubuntu method as their DVD version just doesn't exist anywhere anymore) it practically failed to reckognise every single thing with small exception of nvidia graphics card, and even then it botched up xorg.conf and I had to fix it by hand. I never got TV out to work, all remotes remotes failed to work with lirc (I remember I had to modify few things in gentoo before as well) , the interface itself was clonky and full of options I never set in first place (like lights controls), with huge, massive letters not fitting into GUI elements and wrong resolution for the 17" TFT.
I got it to run, sort of, with stuff started by hand from remote shell from another box, and could probably start fixing it for months but I just couldn't see the point. It was advertised as easy to roll out competitor to Win MCE but at this point in time it's not even on the same continent as Redmont, let alone vicinity of XP MCE. If you have the same hardware as developers, maybe it works the same way as on videos, otherwise, you can do so much better, so much faster and so much easier without it. Good promo video, not much to do with reality though.
