Revision as of 09:48, 28 April 2009

I am located in Germany and dedicated to Linux since about 1996.

On this page I will give a short explanation of my running installation and provide some information about my success stories and dead ends regarding linuxmce.

Installation

Core

VM-Ware machine on a Host running slackware Linux 12.2. Virtualization Software is vmware-server 1.0.5 The host machine has the following hardware:

• AMD Athlon(tm) 64 3200+
• 2 GB RAM
• 2x 250GB (mirroring RAID)

It runs 4 virtual machines of which one is the linuxmce core.

Media Director connected to television

• Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80GHz
• 1280MB RAM
• 80GB HDD
• analog TV card with Philips Semiconductors SAA7134/SAA7135HL Video Broadcast Decoder (still struggling to get audio working, picture is fine though).

Network drives

I tried exporting the harddrives via SMB/CIFS but always the cifs stopped working and trashed my dmesg on the core with timeout problems and the like and from time to time the core was filled with stalled cifsd processes and simply stopped responding. The messages in the dmesg looked like the following (incomplete list):

[254906.460997]  CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -6
[256108.323955]  CIFS VFS: server not responding
[256108.324002]  CIFS VFS: No response for cmd 117 mid 3
[256108.455770]  CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -11
[256739.399902]  CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -6

When it comes to serving CIFS to a network, samba is working fast and reliable but mounting cifs and keeping them mounted I guess the fellows at kernel.org needs some more time and therefore I decided to try NFS. I admit, it has its caveats regarding security but in my LAN I know all the hosts and my WLAN is sealed via a firewall from the rest of the lan, therefore it is worth a try. As I already have a Samba PDC and all the userdatabase in a LDAP tree, I tried to use Microsoft Services for Unix but gave up frustrated after 2 days as I simply could not get windows to map the users right, I always ended up to be "nobody".

The other alternative was to install the cygwin NFS Service. As I always have cygwin installed on my machines, I fired it up and after some Minutes everything was set up and working.

On my linux workstations and servers NFS was running out of the box.

I then had to install the network drives manually in the web interface of linux mce but that was pretty easy.

Since I moved to NFS I had no deadlocks anymore and the whole system is rocking fast (exception of this is, when the media library decides to update itself).

Host 1

This is my windows workstation running Windows XP Professional. The storage is provided via above mentioned cygwin NFS Server.

Host 2

The fileserver in my LAN. This one is running slackware Linux 12.2. This is where nearly all data in my LAN ends up. It exports the media disks via NFS for linuxmce and via SMB for my windows workstations. See above for the motivation of why I decided against using cifs in linuxmce.

What I did so far with linuxmce

Success stories

Installed in vmWare-Server virtual machine

As I had no spare computer with enough power, I decided to give the installation on my vmware Server a try. I mounted the installation DVD in the virtual DVD rom and fired up the machine. It started installing immediately. I did not want to store media on the core as disk throughput is slower on virtual hardware and it is more difficult to reach the files stored on virtual disks. Therefore a grand total of 40GB is more than enough space for a linuxmce core. I tried with 20 GB before but that was too less for the installer and it simply stopped in the middle of copying the files (I guess one of the partitions ran out of space). Installing on the 40GB virtual disk was done after about one hour of installing.

Running the wizard and so on went through without any problem and there it was, my core.

Booting up a small system of spare parts (Media Director) via LAN also went fine. Configuring it needed a little tweaking, as it did not detect my NVidia GeForce 440MX card and therefore I had to tweak a little (sorry, I don't know anymore what exactly I have done).

Attached a new remote

I was finally able to get my remote configured using lirc. I tried to write a device independant howto in LIRC, so others will have less hassle to get theirs running.

Dead ends

Installation in vmWare Workstation

It seems that this is simply not possible at the moment. The kernel refuses to start up in this environment and therefore one can not run linuxmce. Maybe this will change with a newer kernel in the upcoming release.