Although Boxee seemed the more obvious choice, it loses the high ground if you lack a decent internet connection. Just when I was about to give up hope, I heard about Enna – an incredible open source Linux media center, developed by the GeeXboX team, and ready for its first public release.

Enna is a lightweight XBMC concurrent, developped by the GeeXboX team as its distribution brand new user interface. Enna allows you to listen to your favorite music, watch your movies and TV shows, browse through your personnal photos and read comics and mangas from over the Internet.

KDE is proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts. KDE's Plasma Media Center (PMC) is aimed towards a unified media experience on PCs, Tablets, Netbooks, TVs and other devices. Plasma Media Center can be used to view images, play music or watch videos.

XBMC Media Center (formerly XBox Media Center) is a free and open source application for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Xbox, that can turn your Ubuntu 8.04 LTS or 8.10 into a veritable media center platform, with video playback, streaming videos, audio, images, playlist playback, slideshows and more.

I recently got a PlayStation 3 from my wonderful girlfriend, and one of the reasons I wanted one was for its great possibilities of being a media center. I installed MediaTomb on my Linux machine (Gentoo) and after half an hour of configurations, it was ready to stream content to the PS3.

The Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is a media center application for Linux, Mac, and Windows that allows you to manage/watch/listen to/view your videos, music, and pictures.

Linux has come a long way in support for multimedia and graphics. Today we will see how to transform Ubuntu 8.10 into a media center platform. You can achieve this using various software like MythTV and Boxee, but we're going to use XBMC Media Center (formerly XBox Media Center).

Lauri Taimila has released his media center "Entertainer" under the GPL, and is calling for Developers. Entertainer aims to be a simple and easy-to-use media center solution. It uses python, the gstreamer multimedia framework, and the Clutter UI-library, which allows sleek OpenGL animated user interfaces.

Boxee is a new entrant into the increasingly crowded open source media center space. The company's eponymous application is billed as a "social media center" -- melding a smorgasbord of social networking services into an XBMC-based media center designed for the couch-centric user.