[Nottingham] Linux Media PC

[Matt]

I've been fildding with a spare machine (P600) in an attempt to build
a "Media Centre" type PC. So far I've got it booting from the network
into something called "Geexbox" which is a very small Mplayer based
thing. My BIOS has a "Boot from Network First" option but my NIC
(Macronix Tulip based thing) doesn't seem to have a boot ROM and I've
ended up sticking a tiny pxe boot ROM on a 20Gb disk at the moment.
Horrendous waste and now my diskless machine has a 20Gb disk in it! :)

Had a couple of questions.

1) Does anyone know of a good cheap NIC that will boot from the
network.  Everything I've found online offers "slot for boot ROM" as
opposed to already having one installed.

2) Can anyone recommend a good distro for this... something that's
reasonably ready to go "out the box". I want something that will let
me browse and play Audio/Video files over a network.. preferably via
Samba but alternatively via NFS. It must be a nice "remote control"
type interface too.. nothing that needs a mouse + keyboard. Things
I've looked at so far are Geexbox, Movix/Movix2 and MythTV.  Geexbox
seems to lack features and the others are possibly a little overblown.

Please bear in mind that I know very little about this... I only heard
of PXE about two days ago and had never booted off a network before.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Regards,

Matt