Selecting right distro for file sharing/mce computer.
 

Hey, I had a few questions i wanted to ask, I am pretty much a newbie at this point, the last time i messed around with linux was fedora 4 or 5, and that wasnt to indepth th begin with.

Let me describe my situation. I am moving into a new dorm with 4 other friends at the end of the summer. We are all media junkies, and have a plethora of media, mostly on external USB drives. And so i was tasked with making a media server for our dorm. Here are the couple points we thought about.

1.)Will be installed on a somewhat older computer (I think it is still a P4, so i could run a windows offering, but linux seems so much better suited for this type of app.)

2.)Needs to auto mount USB drives, and share them over the network. I know when i had messed with linux, it was all manual, I dk if there is a script i can implement to do all this when a new usb device is detected?

3.) Must be able to share to both windows and mac based computers (win xp and mac mini/newer macbook)

4.) I was also thinking about adding my usb tuner to the box so that we could remotely record our missed shows etc, i will need to see if it is on the hcl...

5.) The idea was to put it in our living room and connect to the tv to allow us to watch our media on the tv.

6.) Remote access would be nice, so i can be the lazy guy i am and sit in my room and control the box remotely, instead of walking 10 ft around the corner to the tv...

Thats the wish list, I have done some research, I read up on linuxmce, and the new ahmahi home server. and also had standard ubuntu distro recommended to me. I really liked ubuntu when i played with a friends computer, and seems like a good choice, if that is the case i would just need some recommendations for any add ons/scrips i would need to add to accomplish my goals.

thanks for any recomendations and help!

Hi,

You could 'google/Linux' for 'Linux media server' and get tons of hits.

The first on my search gave me 'LinuxMCE'. I haven't used LinuxMCE but I will probably look into it since I want to setup a good 'jukebox' for my home use.

yeah i did just that before i posted, it looked pretty sweet, and is just an add on to kubuntu, if i did start to use this, the other items i had outlined, how would i acheive them, are they built into kubuntu, or are there apps i can install to allow me to do this?

Hi,

I don't use the *buntus'. But most of the mounting can be handled with '/etc/fstab'. HAL and udev should handle the auto detection if the udev rules are setup properly. Some tweaking or even a need to create local rules may be required.

You could look at a 'NAS' to service some of the needs. 'FreeNAS' is a good BSD based NAS.

This link and others are available from 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

Well I am downloading linuxMCE right now, And will test it out for awhile, it looks like I can just use samba to share my drives, i will just need to see if it will work with removable drives like mine. any other sugestions are apreciated.

geexbox is really cool.

Ive seen the LinuxMCE but haven't tried it yet. Looks really cool. Also look at KnoppMyth.