My SLUG (Linksys NSLU2)

Network Storage and Linux Box modification of a NSLU2

Monday, February 12, 2007

All I want is Some Music!

The Life of a SLUG

I spent a few weeks of evenings working on my slug’s ability to share my music.
I ended up back-peddling on my first impression about the Twonkymedia server.


I have decided to use Twonkymedia, simply because it works so well.
They have developed a NSLU2 version and it runs on the slug.

http://www.twonkyvision.de/Download/TwonkyMedia/index.html

I tried a few other options before going back to Twonky.

First, I worked with mt-daapd. That works great for playing music through itunes on an individual computer on the network. But the goal was to serve out the music and connect to my house sound system and play my music without a mess of wires running from my computer to the stereo.

Afterall, that’s why I found and installed the Netgear MP101.

The Netgear unit came with some software that I installed on one of my windows boxes on the network. It actually worked pretty good, except it ran on a windows box and served the music through that computer and I had the music files stored on a hard drive hung off the SLUG. I did not want to depend on a windoze box in the other room to hear my music in my living room, so I looked for an optware package for the SLUG and found ushare.

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Applications/UShare

It is a free UPnP A/V Media Server for Linux. I installed it and it did have some promise, but it was not very dependable. Songs would quit in the middle, the MP101 would hang and need to be rebooted and after a few nights of interrupted jamming, so I looked at Twonky again.

Perhaps I have gained a few new brain cells over the past few weeks, but I actually installed Twonkymedia with ease and opened up the web interface and was listening to my music in minutes. It did not hang, it was easy to configure and has run smooth for over a week.

I decided to keep it. It started to nag me about registering and I shelled out 30 dollars to those crazy Germans who have been developing the software. I thought of looking for a hack and ignoring the payment, but since I am blogging this and it is a bit public, I shelled out the cash and have a legitimate license to use their stuff.

Hey, I have paid for all the hardware, why start stealing something within this project now?

Next, I want to do some fancy stuff with my photos. I thought I might look for another SLUG on ebay, but people have gone NUTS! The bidding is high and everyone is getting $70 to $80 for used SLUGs. Might as well go retail at that point!

I have my eye on an additional printserver to add. I tried the hub-hung-off-the-port idea and that does not work well enough for me. Ithink I will add a seperate print server and try CUPs again.

Stay tuned as I listen to my TUNES!!!