I've been working on setting up a media server of sorts; basically it's a file server I use to serve up my audio and video files, preferably by streaming to my iPod.
This machine is an old Pentium II laptop with 128MB of RAM, with 4GB of hard disk space, no Ethernet or wireless adapter. A perfect candidate for installing Linux on it, especially Gentoo.
Since I have more powerful machines than the laptop that I can compile software on, I set up another Gentoo installation in a virtual machine so that I can initially set up the OS and software, and tar up the installation using the stage4 method outlined on gentoo-wiki.com. I set the virtual machine up months before I got any of the hardware I needed to put the laptop on the network.
I bought a USB ethernet adapter from TrendNET (TU-ET100C) that has drivers readily available in Linux. I also bought a Belkin Wireless G USB adapter, that uses the zd1211rw driver. Once I used the SystemRescueCD to extract my stage4 tarball onto the laptop I compiled the kernel to allow wireless access using instructions in gentoo-wiki.com. I was able to get the wireless adapter working flawlessly, by emerging (installing in Gentoo-speek) the firmware for the wireless adapter, setting up wpa_supplicant, and editing the /etc/conf.d/net (The file for setting up ethernet and wireless adapters in Gentoo.) I now have an Internet capable laptop.
Next I installed Apache, Samba, and PHP. I downloaded some scripts to take a folder of fileiles and generate a .m3u playlist, andI found a script that takes a m3u list and turns it into a RSS feed. This allows me to stream audio to my PSP, as well as allow me to download movies over my network at home. I also downloaded and installed SQLite and Jinzora, because I want to make that work, also. Right now I'm having time out issues with Jinzora, probably because I have such a slow machine. I'm going to tweak the scripts some to get around that.
Relevant links
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Wireless_Networking
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Custom_Stage4#Introduction
http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/m3utorss/
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
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