I write about something off-topic that I did on Christmas day. I’m writing it here because my wife is tired of hearing about it and I want to tell someone…
First, a little history. For years I've been running a Linux server in the basement to share out videos, music and photos to the TVs in the house. It was running Plex <https://www.plex.tv/> server and the Plex client on our several Roku <https://www.roku.com/index> boxes could read the various media. A few weeks ago, a power surge came through the house and zapped the server. (It was behind a surge protector, but electricity is weird stuff.) To replace it, Santa delivered a Raspberry Pi 3B <https://www.raspberrypi.org/> computer. The Pi is a marvelous little one-board computer about the size of a credit card. The board itself is only $35. Add in a power supply, case and microSD card, and a whole computer comes together for under $60. As you might expect, the Pi isn't top of the line, but it isn't bad. The hardware is an ARM processor running at 1.2 GHz paired with a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU. Built-in are Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, four standard USB ports, HDMI video and a gigabyte of RAM. It has a microSD card slot for booting. Pretty good for the price! Although it runs several operating systems, including Android, Chromium and Windows 10 IoT, the preferred one is called Raspbian <http://www.raspbian.org/>, a port of Debian Linux. On Christmas morning, the machine went together in under five minutes. The completed project is about the same size as a bar of soap. I downloaded the Raspbian installer image to my MacBook Pro and installed it onto a 32 GB microSD card plugged into the USB all-format card reader normally used for my camera cards. After inserting the microUSB into the Pi and hooking up a keyboard, mouse and monitor, I plugged it into the wall. It booted right up to the familiar Debian GUI. A few clicks later, the Pi was on my WiFi network and I was surfing the Web with the Chrome browser. The standard Raspbian installation comes with the normal stuff you'd expect on a Debian machine. Besides the Chrome browser, LibreOffice is there, giving all the standard full-featured office apps. Email, a few games and lots of programming utilities round out the standard image. There are thousands of other programs that can be installed from the Debian software library. Installation is drop-dead simple using the usual Debian apt-get utility. I immediately added Emacs and a VNC server. What I found most amazing is the full installation of Mathematica that comes for free with the standard Raspbian distribution. It is the Swiss army knife of mathematical programs and has been one of my most useful tools for many years. On the Mac or Windows, Mathematica is a subscription program costing about $350 per year. The Raspberry Pi + Raspbian is certainly the least expensive way to get Mathematica. One of the things I like to do when I get to play with Mathematica on a new computer is run a few simple benchmarks. Usually, the first is computing π to a million decimal places. On my old G5 tower Mac in 2004 it took about 12 seconds. The 2016 MacBook Pro on which I'm writing this takes 0.0294 seconds. The Pi took 4.23 seconds. This isn't bad for a $60 computer. I used to do serious computing on that old G5 cheese grater and the Pi seems far more capable. Just as an aside, I did a similar benchmark with my first computer, an Apple //e, in 1983. Mathematica wasn't around yet, so I had to write a program for the 6502 processor. It did π to 2000 decimal places in just over an hour. (The very first deep computer calculation of π was done to 2037 decimal places in 1949 by John von Neumann on the ENIAC. It took over 70 hours.) Back to my main goal, setting up the Pi as a media server. All the media I want to serve is kept on a WD MyCloud <https://www.wdc.com/products/personal-cloud-storage/my-cloud-home.html?cid=google:ppc:mch-2017-q4:mch:nas:us_-_brand_-_my_cloud_-_phrase:wd_my_cloud:wd_mycloud:phrase&pk_campaign=us_-_brand_-_my_cloud_-_phrase&pk_kwd=wd_mycloud_ct> RAID connected to the local network. The plan was to net mount the file server on the Pi, so it looked like an external drive, and then install media serving software on the Pi. The MyCloud can be accessed by standard Apple file sharing (APFS), Windows file sharing (CIFS, SMB) and NFS. As a Linux machine, the natural choice seemed to be NFS. But, Raspbian comes with Samba <https://www.samba.org/> pre-installed, so CIFS is also an option. I tried both and CIFS was the hands-down winner for speed. Now how to serve the media. There are several options available here. My previous server was running a full-on home theater system called Plex <https://www.plex.tv/> It worked well with both the server and Roku, but was a pain to install and keep up to date on the server. Its main competitor is another home theater server called Kodi <https://kodi.tv/> which seems to require an Android phone in order to be useful on a Roku. Kodi was eliminated because of Android and I didn’t feel like messing with Plex right away. There’s another method, which is pretty simple, lacking the silver bells and shiny lights of the full theater systems: DLNA. Most people have never heard of DLNA, but it’s actually a standard for serving media that’s been around since the early 2000s. A lot of devices know how to handle it—many TVs, Blu-Ray players and, most importantly, Roku. You often have to go spelunking in the manuals to find it. DLNA is kind of the lowest common denominator for media servers. Debian Linux includes a bare-bones program to serve DLNA. It took about two minutes to install MiniDLNA <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MiniDLNA> on the Pi, and another ten minutes to configure it. Configuration basically means telling it where to find the media files. Right now, all the files are usable through the Roku Media Player channel on any Roku box. They are also visible on my Toshiba Blu-Ray player and my only smart TV, a small LG. In none of the cases is the interface pretty, but it works well. On Christmas evening we all watched Casablanca for the umpteenth time, streamed through the Roku. (Casablanca was the only movie everyone could agree upon.) The Mac can access DLNA stuff with VLC <https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html> and the iPad and iPhone can use it through several apps such as C5 <http://www.creation.com.es/creation-5-app/>. The Pi seems to be another small step in the inevitable decline of desktop computing. Instead of having the traditional do-it-all box on the desk, we’re moving toward lots of little dedicated devices. My Pi media server is sitting on a shelf in a corner of the basement next to the cable modem, network switch and file server. It has nothing plugged into it but power and an Ethernet cable. I can log into it at any time from my Mac with VNC Viewer or SSH from the terminal. I’ve already got ideas for how to use my next Raspberry Pi. HNY, L^2 PS/ As a final note, it occurred to me that the Pi, Roku, Blu-Ray player, MyCloud and Netgear switch I mentioned above are all little dedicated computers running Linux. --- Lee Larson [email protected] Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize. — Richard Feynman People Magazine, 1985
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