Revision as of 19:28, 18 June 2008

My Setup

Hardware

Dedicated Core

• Dual Pentium 3 (1ghz)
• 2 Gb ram
• Onboard 100mb ethernet (external net)
• 64bit pci 1gb fiber card (internal net)
• 2 SB Live! cards
• 1 ati rage 128 (just enough video for a dedicated server)
• 1 80 Gb drive (system and audio media)
• 1 250 GB drive (video media)

Media Directors

• None (I use XBMC on an Xbox to watch videos)

Orbiters

• Web orbiter
• Windows orbiter installed under wine

Automation

• 1 CM11A
• A couple of X10 switches and outlets

Audio

• 2 zones of whole house audio completed so far (this system is being designed for background music)
• All speaker wiring goes to a central location in the basement.
• Zone 1 - first soundcard -> amp ->ceiling speakers on first floor. Manual volume control in each room
• Zone 2 - second soundcard -> car amp ->pair of car speakers in outdoor housings on patio

Climate

• DS9490R w/ no sensors currently attached
• GSD weather retrieval plugin NOAA Weather

Software

• LinuxMCE 704 (haven't had time to upgrade to 710)
• Latest Squeezecenter (replaced SlimServer shipped with LinuxMCE) Upgrading SlimServer
• squeezeslave running on the core for distributed audio (see below for setup)

Squeezeslave Setup

Here's how to setup squeezeslave to run on the core. It's fairly straight forward. One small issue is that because squeezeslave uses the OSS interface you will need a separate sound card for each instance of squeezeslave you want to run.

First download a version of Squeezeslave. I'm running the latest version as it fixed some playback bugs I was having, but any version that works with you're setup should be fine. You'll want to put it somewhere in you're path. I have mine installed in /usr/local/bin

Next add the following to /etc/rc.local (this is my setup for two)

 /usr/local/bin/squeezeslave -m 00:00:00:00:00:01 -o 0 -s -r &
 /usr/local/bin/squeezeslave -m 00:00:00:00:00:02 -o 1 -s -r &

• the MAC address can be whatever you want
• the -o option specifies which OSS output device ie /dev/dsp1
• the -s option tells squeezeslave to wait for a signal to quit rather than control-C
• the -r option tells squeezeslave to keep retrying to connect to the server, useful if the server is not running yet.

Next make sure all the volume levels in the mixer (alsamixer) are set correctly

Next step, manually add the squeezeslave to linuxmce as a squeezebox using the mac address you gave it. Assign it to a room and entertainment area. Regen your orbiters and reset the dcerouter.

That should do it.