Re: Old laptop for a media server ? (F11, mediaTomb, transcoding, uPNP server, etc.)
- From: Richard Heck <rgheck@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:44:34 -0400
On 10/05/2009 01:38 AM, Linuxguy123 wrote:
We have a Dell 5100 laptop sitting here not doing anything. My wife gotDefinitely add RAM. Even if you don't have the big stick, RAM is dirt cheap and will make a big difference.
a new one a year ago. We need a media server to serve large digital
images to client computers running digikam and we also want to run
mediatomb to act as a server for our laptops and our uPNP capable tv.
The 5100 has a Pentium 4 running at 2.66 MHz. Right now it has 256 MB
of RAM, but I think I have 1 GB sitting around here for it. Plug in a
new 7200 RPM 500 GB hard drive ? Run a 1 TB USB drive for more
storage ?
I would like to run Fedora 11 on it. (What else ?) Boot init 3 ? RunI ran Fedora on a server for quite some time, but eventually switched away, for the simple reason that upgrading the server was too painful with Fedora---as I'm sure we all know. And if the upgrade process aborts, then I end up having to reconfigure the whole server. Not to mention that I have to take the thing down anyway to do it. This could be a reason to think about some Debian-based distro, or you could try CentOS, which is what I'm now using. I don't know if MediaTomb can be compiled for CentOS, though---I run Logitech's Slim Server, or whatever it's called now, to feed music to a Squeezebox and two Transporters---or if the formats you would need would be available there. If not, then I'd think about Debian.
init level 5 for doing administration ?
I am running the F11 Live CD on it right now. It seems to work fairlyYou should see my server, then: 300MHz Pentium III.
well, albeit a bit slow.
I love the form factor. It would be quiet and small. Its got a monitorThe only thing I might worry about is heat, and what that will do to the laptop if you're leaving it on all the time. (I'm guessing you want to leave it on all the time.) You could try putting the laptop on one of those laptop cooler things, that has built-in auxiliary fans. I've got one that plugs into one of the USB ports.
and a keyboard and built in battery back up, for a couple hours, anyway.
We have a wireless card for it too... I could do administration on the
couch instead of in some closet somewhere.
Will it do the job ? I'm worried about the transcoding part of things.Transcoding is labor intensive, but, given enough RAM, and assuming you're not trying to transcode full HD, I'd think you'd have a chance of having enough power. I think MediaTomb also has an option to "buffer" the output, and if you set that high enough, then that'll help a lot.
Our TV doesn't support many video formats but mediaTomb does transcoding
so that we can watch just about anything we can store.
Will it do the job ?
If I were doing this now, I might think about building a dual-core Atom-based box in some smallish case. The only downside to this sort of thing, and this applies to the laptop, too, is that you very likely will run out of disk space at some point, even with a 1TB drive, if you're really collecting the videos, and then you have a problem. A conventional case gives you a lot more room for new drives.
Richard
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