Old laptop for a media server ? (F11, mediaTomb, transcoding, uPNP server, etc.)
Thomas Cameron
thomas.cameron at camerontech.com
Tue Oct 6 23:40:45 UTC 2009
On 10/05/2009 12:38 AM, Linuxguy123 wrote:
> We have a Dell 5100 laptop sitting here not doing anything. My wife got
> 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 ?
Definitely max out the RAM. Memory's cheap and it helps a LOT.
> I would like to run Fedora 11 on it. (What else ?) Boot init 3 ? Run
> init level 5 for doing administration ?
Runlevel 3 and then ssh -X into it for admin with GUI tools if you need 'em.
> I am running the F11 Live CD on it right now. It seems to work fairly
> well, albeit a bit slow.
>
> I love the form factor. It would be quiet and small. Its got a monitor
> 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.
> 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 ?
Totally depends on what your criteria for success is. If you don't mind
that laptops typically have God-awful slow drives you should be fine.
Instead of using a USB drive I would spring for an eSATA PCMCIA card and
use eSATA. It's much faster.
Thomas
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