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Old 08-25-2005, 07:18 PM   #1
JAPSTER
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Question Xbox


I am new to Linux and am currently experimenting with Fedora Core 4. I have an XBOX that runs XBMC and I would like to make music on my Linux machine available to XBMC.

My Linux machine seems to be running pretty cool so far so I don't want to make a mess of it.

I assume I need to make network shares, but am unsure how to do this with Fedora Core 4.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks people.

P.S. Can anybody point me in the right direction for backups and partitioning?
 
Old 08-26-2005, 03:38 AM   #2
mickyg
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I'm not familiar with XBMC but if you need network shares you might want to check out Samba, but I'm not entirely sure if you need it since I know nothing about XBMC.

For simple one off backups you can just create a tarball of the directory, i.e. /home/username, if you want to schedule daily/weekly/monthly backups then I think you need Cron, which as I understand it basically just automates creating tarballs of directories. I don't know exactly how to configure it in FC4 but Mandriva has quite a nice wizard to guide you through it in it's Control Centre, I would assume FC4 would have something similar. Of course there's always the shell

For partitioning there is fdisk, cfdisk (an easier version of fdisk) and qtparted. I think they're probably the main ones. By default I would expect FC4 to install fdisk and cfdisk. I used qtparted from a Knoppix Live CD to resize my Windows drive and install Linux, worked without a hitch.
 
Old 08-26-2005, 04:12 AM   #3
JAPSTER
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Cheers for the reply mickyg.

There are options in XBMC for SAMBA shares, and I have SAMBA server available in FC4. I will get on it straight away. I would it assume it to be a simple enough task, but I thought I'd get advice first just incase I was barking up the wrong tree!

Regarding the backups, I like the cron idea. It's not good to rely on ones self to perform backups is it. It would be good to be able to take an image backup of a particular partition, or even pyhsical drive at regular intervals with via cron.

I am still trying to get my head around LVM at the moment. Until I do, I don't want to really start mess about with the filesystem structure until I know the best way to achieve what I want. This is, in a nutshell, seperating my personal important data from the operating system. This way, if case I have to reinstall the OS (hopefully not), I wont loose the vital stuff.
 
Old 08-26-2005, 08:20 AM   #4
mickyg
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From what it sounds like you basically want a seperate partition for /home directory, and maybe /opt or /usr/local.

I personally prefer qtparted and cfdisk to anything else I've seen, they're really easy to use but I found this about LVM aswell.
 
Old 08-26-2005, 10:53 AM   #5
JAPSTER
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Yeah, you're right, that's precisely what I'm aiming at. I'm going to get on with it straight away. I'll let you know what occurs (if your interested!).

While I'm at it, I wondered if you had any recommendations with regard to partition sizes. I have two Hard Drives installed, one of 200GB and another 60GB. I have no dual boot setup, so all capacity will be purely for the use of the single Fedora4 OS. I was thinking maybe dedicate the 60GB for backup purposes? That way I can accommodate the 200GB failing. Although I will not have the backup capacity to accommodate the entire contents of the 200Gb, at least I will be able to secure a backup of the OS and my other most important files. I also have DVD-RW to offload to. What do you reckon?

Nice one mickyg.
 
Old 08-26-2005, 01:47 PM   #6
mickyg
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I think it depends what you want to backup, what kind of things you use your PC for etc. If you're not dual booting and aren't interested in sharing anything with windows then that's a step in the right direction. As regards to partition size's, I've seen loads of threads/posts of this forum about it and everyone seems to come up with different answer, I personally feel it's up to the individual. If you think you're gonna have heaps and heaps of stuff in your home directory then make it big. You've got the space for it. At the end of the day partitions can be resized, albeit I would only do that where completely necessary, and you're probably never gonna use up 200GB.

I must say, I'd be a little surprised if FC4 hadn't done seperate partitions for /home. What's the output of "df" at the shell?

Since you say you've got 2 hd's, there should be a minimum of 3 entries brought back (2 hd's and dvd drive). Here's what mine looks like:

[mickyg@localhost ~]$ df
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 15G 2.7G 11G 20% /
/dev/hda1 30G 25G 4.6G 85% /mnt/win_c
/dev/hda2 10G 1.5G 8.6G 15% /mnt/win_d
/dev/hdc 489M 489M 0 100% /mnt/cdrom

This tells you about your partitions, as you can see I don't have a seperate partition for /home, because I use /mnt/win_d for sharing stuff between XP and Linux.

Have a look at your output, and post if you've got any questions.

Also, something that might be worth baring in mind, I don't know what happens if you decide to install a different distro whilst retaining your home partition, i.e. all your KDE/Gnome settings are stored there, if you're on KDE 3.2 and choose a distro on KDE 3.whatever in the future, I don't know if it will all work fine or if it'll give you headaches.

When it comes to backup, the 60GB as a backup sounds like a good idea, bare in mind backups, or tarballs, are compressed so you'll probably be alright for quite a while.

Hope that's all made sense, I tend to ramble

Last edited by mickyg; 08-26-2005 at 01:54 PM.
 
Old 08-26-2005, 03:26 PM   #7
JAPSTER
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Back again. I've been busy reading about LVM and I found it really interesting. I seem to have my head around it and will definitely be making the most of it. I took on board what you said about the /home folder provided by it's own volume. This seems to be the most obvious decision.

I am currently reading up on Snapshots and am I right in assuming will able to use these with Cron to automate backups?

I think I now need to get a better understanding of the Linux directory structure, i.e what each directory is designated for; where newly installed programs go; which directories warrant a partition etc etc... This may perhaps guide me in deciding whether or not I need to create additional partitions to house other system directories. (or not).

When I used XP I had the same 2 drives, each split into a couple of partitions. I generally install the OS and all the regular programs I used, configured them and then took an image of the C: partition. This way if all went pear shaped I have a basic 'preferred installation' backup to fall back on. I intend to carry on with this system with Linux.

I've just realized how much of a tangent I've gone off at from the original XBOX question! Learning about Linux is far more interesting. I originally moved to Linux so I could learn PHP. This is still my goal, but along the way I felt I really should become familiar with the whole LAMP setup. As the L is the first letter in the LAMP acronym, what better place to start!

I am at the stage where I have all the vital ingredients up and running for my LAMP setup, but they will surely need some tinkering. I have the following running:

Apache 2
MySql 4.1
PHP5
phpMyAdmin
Postfix SMTP
Dovect POP3 / IMAP
SpamAssassin

I also need to look into antivirus. I'm all firewalled up thanks to my router. I seem to be piling work upon myself.

Everything seems to be working OK, so I suppose I could continue my PHP education right away, but I feel the whole setup merts investigation. Mind you at this rate I'll have forgotten all the PHP I 've learnt.

I'm rambling now. Anyway, here is the # df output:
]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
239G 2.9G 224G 2% /
/dev/hda1 99M 9.8M 84M 11% /boot
/dev/shm 252M 0 252M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdc 2.6G 2.6G 0 100% /media/cdrecorder1

I was unsure what the /dev/shm was, but I gather it is temporary storage space? Why isn't the swap partition listed? I have 512MB RAM and was expecting to see a 1GB swap.

Keep the info coming - if you have time. Also, I would be grateful of any other internet resources you could recommend with reference to any of the above (I know that's quite a tall order!).

Thanks again.
 
Old 04-18-2006, 03:53 AM   #8
mickyg
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I just re-read this post and realised that I too am now using XBMC on my xbox!! This must be where I got the idea

Anyway, first things first, please add the distribution name to your user settings so we can all make sure we're on the same page.

You're correct about /dev/shm, it's shared memory, I got this from the VMWare site regarding changing the size of /dev/shm:

Quote:
To remount /dev/shm, use the following command:
mount -o remount,size=<size_and_identifier> /dev/shm

For example:
mount -o remount,size=1G /dev/shm
OR
mount -o remount,size=512M /dev/shm

To make this change persistent between times when you reboot your Linux machine, change the mount entry for /dev/shm in /etc/fstab by adding the size=<size> option. For example:
none /dev/shm tmpfs size=1G 0 0
As for anti-virus applications, on Linux?? No need anymore mate only kidding, if you what to use AV software the only two I know or (I'm sure there are probably a few more, visit Sourceforge.net and have a look) are ClamAV and there is a Linux version of AVG Free but this is a trial version. AVG is what I use in XP and it works a treat, much better than Norton or McAfee.

Although you seem to have already created your LVM setup, unless I've miss read it you only seem to have the one logical volume, if it were me I would have had at least two, / and /home, otherwise it kind of negates the purpose of having resizable partitions.

Hope all that helped!

Last edited by mickyg; 04-18-2006 at 03:58 AM.
 
  


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