Author Archives: Ben

About Ben

30 something IT geek and Sunday league goalkeeper from Hertfordshire.

Installing Arch Linux with KDE

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I’ve always kept an interest in Linux and I normally check out the latest version of Ubuntu, however after hearing so many good things about Arch Linux I decided to download a copy and give it a try.

The default desktop environment for Ubuntu has always been GNOME, so I decided to install KDE, this guide will step through what I did to install Arch Linux and then install KDE on my system.

I have used KDE before via Kubuntu, however I thought I would try Arch Linux becasue as they say, it’s a lightweight distrobution that keeps things simple

You’ve reached the website for Arch Linux, a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

This means I can install a clean copy of KDE and install only the applications I want.

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Waiting (patiently) for a Raspberry Pi

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I’ve been following the development of the Raspberry Pi pretty much since it was announced, and since then I have thought of numerous uses for a tiny, low powered, yet powerful and cheap (£16* without ethernet, £22* with) device.

My main reason is to run one as a media box plugged into my TV via the Raspberry Pi’s HDMI port, and last week the XBMC team released a video of their software running on a Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is capable of decoding 1080p video and with it’s HDMI port make it a perfect media streamer.

The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.

Raspberry Pi’s should hopefully start shipping late Janusry, early Februrary 2012, and I cannot wait!

* Prices are an estimate based on current conversion rates.

Installing MiniDLNA on Arch Linux

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I’ve been moving round Linux distributions recently and currently find myself using (and rather enjoying) Arch Linux.

As my article on installing MiniDLNA on Ubuntu is so far my post popular, I though I’d document how I installed and configured it on Arch.

There is a MiniDLNA package for Arch in the community reposotory, meaning it can be installed very easily via Pacman (the following commands have been run as root, add sudo to the beginning of them if you have installed and configured it)

pacman -S minidlna

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Installing MiniDLNA on Ubuntu Server

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When setting up my Ubuntu server I wanted it to be able to stream my media via UPnP/DLNA, I looked at a few solutions including MediaTomb and uShare, however I decided to go with MiniDLNA based on the fact that it was lightweight (my server isn’t the most powerful) and that I have a Western Digital TV Live which plays pretty much any file format meaning I didn’t need the server to transcode my media, MiniDLNA will quite happily however stream media to my other devices, like MP3′s and AVI’s (XviD/AC3) to my Xbox 360.

Installing MiniDLNA is available in the default repositories if you are running Ubuntu 11.10 and it can be installed by running the command

sudo apt-get install minidlna

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Adding Personal Package Archives (PPA) to Ubuntu Server

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Personal Package Archives (PPA) are an easy to install and upgrade software on Ubuntu

Personal Package Archives (PPA) allow you to upload Ubuntu source packages to be built and published as an apt repository by Launchpad.

It saves you having to download and compile software if it isn’t available from the default Ubuntu repositories, it will also allow you (in some cases) to update existing software.

To easlity add a PPA to your list of repositories on Ubuntu Server, firstly you will need to install python-software-properties

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

You can now add PPA’s using the following command

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:name-of-repository

Setting up a simple Samba share with Ubuntu

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After the 1TB drive that was connected to my home server (running Windows XP) died, I decided to go for cheaper, more open source approach.

My requirements for a home server are pretty simple, I would like it to function as a seedbox, to be able to download from Usenet, stream my media using DLNA/UPnP and more importantly to be accessible from my Windows 7 desktop and laptop for file storage.

After looking at my various options, including FreeNAS and Amahi, I decided to go with Ubuntu Server.

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Streaming music via UPnP with foobar2000 and foo_upnp

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One of the many great features of foobar2000 is the ability for anyone to write plugins using the Software Development Kit (SDK).

My most frequently used and favourite plugin is foo_upnp, this will turn foobar2000 into a UPnP/DLNA renderer, server and control point.

You will need to install foo_upnp on the PC you wish to stream music from (server) and also any PC’s you wish to stream to (client).

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Organize your music with foobar2000 and foo_fileops

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Whilst browsing through the 674 albums stored on my PC, I decided it was time for a thorough tidy up!

In the past I have been using the excellent Mp3tag, however, after reading a few forum posts where people were mentioning and praising foobar2000 and it’s component “File Operations” (aka foo_fileops) I decided to looking into it myself.

I was amazed at how simple foo_fileops was to use and also by how powerful and configurable it was, it took no time at all for me to tidy up my entire music collection.

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