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Linuxmce

Linuxmce is a media server for Linux

Bluetooth Speakers and Squeezeslave

The setup serving audio in our kitchen was pretty conviluded and had a few too many cables jammed into a cupboard: A thin-client with powered speakers, attached to a wireless access point set to client mode. I picked up a newer set of powered speakers that came with a 30 pin iPod/iPad dock – so I looked online and found an attachment for the iPod dock that converts it to a Bluetooth audio receiver (similar to this), so you can connect with any Bluetooth enabled music device (phone, laptop, etc.). I have a laptop (Media Director for LinuxMCE) hooked up to a TV in a close room that’s on most of the time anyway, so I paired the Bluetooth receiver to a laptop and setup squeezeslave to pass audio to the speakers. In summary: Before… Read More »Bluetooth Speakers and Squeezeslave

Rear TV Laptop Stand 1

Rear TV Laptop Stand

This is just a small project to hide a laptop (used for LinuxMCE) I have in the bedroom behind the TV. This makes it a little easier on the eyes, and helps with heat dissipation (bottom of laptop facing out). First I measured the diameter of the screw holes, found screws to fit it, then measured the widest part of the laptop, which just happened to be the heavy end. Used Sketchup to make the bracket and printed two of them: I printed them at 70% infill and drilled the holes bigger. 70% is a bit overkill, but I don’t know how the heat from the laptop would affect them. In summary, quick, cheap, easy and does the job. This is the STL, rotate it -90 degrees before printing it. lenovo_tv_stand_1 The Laptop is a… Read More »Rear TV Laptop Stand

LinuxMCE/Ubuntu Vlan tagging with Cisco Switches

The server I’m using for my LinuxMCE setup has the 1 NIC so I’ve been using eth0 and eth0:1 (eth0:1 is a virtual interface for eth0) for internal and external. It works fine, although not ideal to have 2 broadcast domains running on the switch ports. By using Vlans  I can designate the devices that have access to which interface. This gives a closer configuration to having 2 cards without the need for an additional NIC. Considerations I read that not all NIC drivers support Vlan tagging. The one I used:  Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5723 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 10).To support Vlans you need to be using atleast 1 managed switch, the switches I’m using are Cisco 2960-24-TTL’s. This post was also written using LinuxMCE 10.04 and the Vlans I’m using are 2 and 3.… Read More »LinuxMCE/Ubuntu Vlan tagging with Cisco Switches

Universal Live Linux Backup

I’m I strong believer of making backups of backups, etc.. But not willing to down my LinuxMCE server for ‘x’ amount of hours/days to do it. I used to use Seagate DiscWizard to do it in 8.10, but 10.04 only comes up with kernel errors and I gave up. So I’ve come up with a few other ways of doing it, although some of them are more appropriate to use for milestones or once offs due to the mucking around required to do it. Live Media RAID backup This was easiest, I just peiced together a server with enough storage space to hold every thing. PXE boot the server and setup it up as an additional unmanaged MD. From there you can either manually create a software RAID or try to do it in the… Read More »Universal Live Linux Backup

Turn a WRT350Nv2 into a Squeezeslave (networked audio)

Brought a WRT350N v2 from the flea markets last week ($20), installed OpenWRT 10.03.1 using the WinXP firmware upgrade utility. After that installed I then installed some additional packages (full list). So at this point I was able to insert a cheap USB sound card in the rear and it would detect it. I was able to change the volume using alsamixer for testing. Now for the frustrating part, cross compiling squeezeslave to execute it on the WRT350Nv2. I tried a few precompiled binaries, but they were no good. The basic steps I took were: Download OpenWRT SDK. Make sure you’ve gotten the required packages installed in your host machine, check here as a reference. Download additional packages for the router using opkg or the web-interface, this will allow the use of the USB port and install alsa for… Read More »Turn a WRT350Nv2 into a Squeezeslave (networked audio)

New Server Arrived

To summarize, we were away for 4 weeks and all computers (including server) were turned off, this in turn saved us about $70 off our power bill, so with that, and the average 380-400W of power the server uses I figured a smaller server would pay for itself in no time. Firstly I looked at getting an ITX mobo, then buying RAM, CPU, CASE, etc.. Turned out to be cheaper to buy it as a complete system or buy them second hand. So I bought it as a package, and the one I ended up buying was HP ProLiant N40L from eBay, paid slightly more than the cheapest quote I found, Harris Technologies (Office Works in Perth). It didn’t come with an optical drive, or OS (didn’t need either), I was looking forward to the… Read More »New Server Arrived

Network Audio from Thinclient

This is an extension to HP T5000 As a Network Stereo. Rather than use the thin client as a fully qualified MD where boot times are slow, and it has a lot of non-required process’s running on it, etc… I’ve decided to explore the possibility of making a DIY squeezebox. I figured the Logitechs’ squeezebox would have lower specifications as far as CPU, RAM and storage are concerned. First Option: SqueezeOS Followed this tutorial and it created the images for an arm processor… Failed many times while trying to create a qemux86 and BootCDx86 base. I had tried using many different toolchains although it got to about a days worth of time when the idea was scrapped. Second Option: Andriod install with Squeeze Player App. This was a short lived idea as Andriodx86 ports needed… Read More »Network Audio from Thinclient

Plain Text Notifications On Orbiters

Intergrating third part programs into Linuxmce can be done a few different ways, this looks at a very simple method of sending notifications to all orbiters once an event occurs. In this test, we use Transmission, specifically Transmission-Daemon (a bit-torrent program), used for downloading ISO’s of different distro’s. The DVD sized Linux ISO’s take a while to download, so why not go watch some TV? Now that your busy doing something else away from your PC, you don’t want to have to keep looking to see if it’s finished, so why not send a notification to your orbiters/MD’s? You can either setup a Cron job to check for new files in a directory, and get it to send a message once a condition is met, or you can use Transmissions built-in “script-torrent-done-enabled” feature (available in… Read More »Plain Text Notifications On Orbiters