which media sw and os to use

[unix1adm]

All,

I have a new little box that I want to setup shortly. It’s a Intel 2G with 1G memory and 40G drive. Soon to be a 160G drive. I plan to upgrade memory to 2G later on.

I would like to use this as a Media server for MP3 and DVD in the end.

I am considering Ubuntu or CentOS as the Operating system.

I have Googled the heck out of it for various Media server software.

But I would like to hear from some people that have set this up and use it.

1. What OS did you choose?
2. Why did you choose that OS? (ie support, stability, easy of use/maintenance etc)
3. What Media software did you choose?
3. Why? (ie support, stability, easy of use and setup/maintenance etc)
4. What hardware configuration are you running it on?
5. How does it perform?
6. Any other comments.

Thank you

[unix1adm]

no comments on what to use?

[reed9]

It's hard to answer these sorts of questions. Ultimately, it's always, whatever you like. Ubuntu and CentOS are both good.

But, to answer your questions.

1. I have a little music server at home, and I use Arch Linux.

2. It's a crappy old laptop and for some reason, most distros had trouble with it. Debian had kernel panics almost daily. No other distro I tried made it through the installation process - they all had random and sudden shutdowns a few seconds in. Arch has been the most stable distro on this particular machine.

3. It's just for music, so I use MPD. (And primarily ncmpcpp on the client side.) I've honestly never looked into alternatives, so I couldn't give a comparison of other options. MPD is pretty much the best known and it works for my needs. I think xmms2 does a client/server model as well.

4. Toshiba Satellite M35X
Intel Celeron 1.4 GHz
256 MB RAM
40 GB HD

5. Great.

[Roxoff]

My Media Centre is a P4, 1/2 a gig or ram, a (now) 60GB hdd. I changed the hard disk from a noisy 40 gig one to a quiet 60 gig one. Other than that it's waaay over spec. (other than the video card which is a nVidia 5600 or summat like that - just enough to play full screen video on my telly). I don't need local storage, as I have 2.5TB of storage on my server.

I put Fedora on my box 'cos that's what I'm familiar with - but you could easily try XBMC or LinuxMediaCenter distros. Or one of the ones you mention (my server runs CentOS).

If you're using this mostly for music, then I wouldn't bother hiking the spec any more than you have - if you want it to do full screen hi res video, then you really need to focus on getting a good video card for it. It already has enough memory, and if that's a P4, Atom or later processor, it should cope fine.