Hi All, Like many people, I generally just post to the forum when I have a question. But I thought that, for a change, I'd drop a short note about a success I had building a "budget" slimserver box. Actually, my goal was not the absolute cheapest possible - because while the slimserver is the only full time process currently running I may use it for some other minor purposes in the future.
I selected a Short Form Factor computer by Shuttle - the SK21G. It has video, audio and ethernet all built-in for $179.00 at newegg and other places. Just add memory, CPU, disk and a DVD for software installation and you are all set. I added 512M, a "budget" sempron 3000 and an inexpensive Asus DVD player. I splurged and spent $119.00 on a 320G Western Digital HD (Model # WD3200JD) because I'd seen a review that said it was very quiet. I'm a bit of novice at building computers - but the directions from shuttle were very straightforward. Using the shuttle it is possible to disable the check for keyboard in the bios (hit del on boot to get into the bios). Therefore, there are only 2 connections that go into this box - power and ethernet. One thing that really astounds me - the box is virtually silent. I always kept servers in a wiring closet at my house out of habit - but this box could really be placed anywhere. I've used ssh to stream music to iTunes at work (over a cable modem link) and it works great. I disabled a few processes that I new I would not need and set "init 3" using the built-in SUSE YAST tool - so that unneeded GUI stuff won't run at startup. I can always "init 5" if I want to do GUI stuff. While running ssh, slimserver and "top" - top shows idle CPU of between 98 and 100%. I had to laugh when I saw 100% idle - and ask a unix sys admin friend of mine how 100% idle could be possible... The response using the web over the cable modem link from work is very crisp. Music plays back flawlessly without any stutters (at 320K bps mp3). I used SUSE 10 for the base OS. It installed and detected everything perfectly. I used the SUSE package installation program to install the latest Slimserver rpm from the slimdevices.com web site and that went almost flawlessly too. Unfortunately, the slimserver does not autostart under SUSE. One needs to read the man pages for the SUSE insserv program which is used to hook the slimserver startup script located in the /etc/init.d directory into the SUSE boot-time script startup process. I could likely have gotten by with less CPU, memory and/or disk. The system I built was likely overkill for what I needed - but I wanted a system that I could set and forget. I've filled only about 1/2 of the 320G and at the rate I collect music that should last me several years at the very least. Cheers, Kevin -- kkitts ------------------------------------------------------------------------ kkitts's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1993 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22355 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
