I have a Zotac MAG HD-ND01-U I bought almost 5 years ago that I use to play movies for the family. Even at the time I bought it, the Zotac was very low end; it ships with an Intel Atom N330 CPU, Nvidia ION GPU, 160GB 5400RPM HDD and 2GB of RAM. It has been since upgraded to a 500GB 7200rpm HDD and 4GB of RAM. Previously I was just running Win7 and using MPC-HC to play movies on the big screen. The Zotac was just barely capable of playing 1080p x264 mkvs with that combination; CPU usage was still very high despite using hardware acceleration in LAV Video Decoder. It was also really annoying waiting for Windows processes (TrustedInstaller.exe and svchost.exe) to stop eating CPU cycles after boot up. I decided it was time to take look at Kodi; a software media center formerly known as XBMC. I made a Live USB of Kodibuntu and spent a couple hours just trying to get it to find my movie library over the network; when I finally got a movie to play, it played perfectly with no jitter and very low CPU usage. If anyone out there is wondering if an Intel Atom and Nvidia ION are enough to play 1080p x264 mkvs, I can assure you it will play perfectly under Kodibuntu. However it will struggle with mkvs encoded in 10bit.

After the successful trial of the Live USB, I rebooted and performed the full installation thinking that maybe the network issue was just the Live USB environment. After the full install, I tried installing updates and the network would stop working after a few minutes. I did some searching online and apparently the driver that ships with Ubuntu based distributions doesn’t work properly with the TL-WN822N v3 USB wireless adapter I was using. I found the solution here via this page of the Ubuntu Community Help Wiki. I’ve included all the commands from the solution below; they will install a patched driver and remove the native one.