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OS Advice needed

D

DarkTXKnight

Senior member
OK, Ive got an extra machine that I am trying to figure out what to do with and thought maybe someone would have some advice. At home I have wanted to build a media server box so that everyone can store their DVR stuff there. I also had a box that was a private game server for our frineds playing Q3UT, UT2004 etc. I have been interested in building one big box out of these older components ( AXP3200,2GBRAM, 2x36GB10K SCSI HDD, 2x120GB IDE HDD) and am wondering what OS tp put on this. I had this all running on Win2K3 (I have an MSDN sub) but wondeirng if I might get some better perfomance out of using Linux of some sort. In short what combo would be better:

Win2K3 + dedicated game servers + gbpvr\mediaportal
or
Linux + dedicated game servers + mythtv

any advice is appreciated.
 
From what I hear MythTV is a PITA to setup, so if you go the Linux route you'd better be ready to get your hands dirty. Also you should make sure that your TV card is supported by Linux first, it'll be a pretty pointless attempt if the hardware doesn't work anyway.

Same thing with the games, UT2K4 and Q3 should work fine on Linux but if you plan on hosting any other games make sure they'll run on Linux before diving in.
 
Myth isn't too bad, if you find/follow a guide for your distro. I have set it up a couple times, and it really only takes about a half hour on Ubuntu to get the basic setup up and running, and another hour or two for tweakage.
 
OK well the games I plan to run all are supposed to work fine on linux, and I think there is an unbuntu + myth distro floating around. To me this might be a good reason to make me learn linux 😉 Since I am really better when I have something to do with it.

Also do you think that this setup would perform better as a Linux machine or as Win2K3 in terms of resources ?
 
From my perspective it would be much easier to manage and such. You won't have to walk over to your computer to do stuff and there is no need to have a GUI running and the overhead associated with that.

But with the machines your talking about if you want to use Linux for it I don't think that performance is going to be a issue vs w2k3. I don't know how well they compare.. but Linux will probably use less resources.

Now the mYTHTV backend only does that for the back half, the server half. You'll need a front end, unless you want to run this server in your living room. Got a old Xbox? Those make good inexpensive Mythtv front ends once they've been hacked to run Linux.

Also the TV capture card may be the main issue. Some are well supported, others won't work at all.
 
actually drag that was the idea. Id like to install the myth front end on xbmc and use that to share my dvr stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to use it to share divx files made from ripping my dvds to my pc. eventually i would use the xboxes all over the house to my server backend. the tuner card i have is a happauge pvr 500 and myth is supposed to support it.
do you know if there is anything for connecting an xbox 360 to myth yet?
 
So tell me Drag, should I use the Linux software RAID with this server?? I do backups to another machine of my data, but I would like to use RAID if it wont be a big hit on performance.
 
if you have a decent box, S/W raid is sometimes faster...


btw, what you want to do is look at MythDVD and/or MythVideo. I'm not actually using my tuner in my mythbox just yet, I'm ripping the kids' DVD collection to the server so we can play them without the disks. It has everything you need in mythDVD/MythVideo (parts of the complete myth system) to rip the DVD's.
 
Thats a great Idea....I was just about to ask about other video besides tv recordings.
Any recomendation as to a distro to use to get started?
 
Just use the system your most comfortable with. Any of them can be used to run Mythtv just as well.

I use Debian and the only real 'gotcha' that happens is that you have to muck around with mysql more the other distros. Debian disables some features of MySQL by default (such as network access) because of lack of security inherent in SQL databases.

If you don't have a preference then maybe Fedora might be a good choice. It doesn't have the depth and breadth of aviable pre-compiled software that something like Ubuntu orDebian does, but there is a very nice guide for it. The only trouble with that is that Fedora Core 6 isn't very old yet, and FC distros have a nasty habit of being difficult to handle once they get released, until they get a couple months of use in the real world.
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

Another option I've heard people talk about is Knoppmyth
http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html
Knoppix Mythtv.

Install it to the harddrive for your backend and then the front end can be just live cdrom.

One other gotcha for Mythtv is that the Myth folks don't care about backward or forward compatability in it's network protocols. That is if your frontend and your backend are from different versions of mythtv then it's likely that they won't work together. So it's adventagious to run the same system for both the backend and front end.

So if you want to use that xbmc then it's worth talking to their mailing list or whatnot to find out what they prefer to run on the backend. That way if everybody there has a favorite distro you can get help most easily from them.
 
Ok so I have spent this whole week researching the choices of ubuntu, knippix and fedora with myth. there are some great guides for all of them and i have been salivating at the idea of replacing my win2k3 server with this, especially seeing as i can still have a PDC with samba (neat!) . Im not sure which one to try out though. any suggestions?

One other thing. At work we have RHEL4 servers in production and Ive been helping the DBAs a tiny little bit fooling around with their CentOS4 workstations. Would it possible make sense to go the fedora root because its red hat based? (i.e. similar to work setups maybe) or Should I go with Ubuntu because of its penchat for being user friendly

excited noob to be here 🙂
 
Ubuntu has its community going for it. They have so many guides, tutorials, and knowledgeable people there that chances are this has either already been accomplished or someone will know how to do it.

OpenSUSE is plain easy to use. Their support forums are much more limited (most popular being suseforums.net and suselinuxsupport.de), but usually you wouldn't need it. They have yast modules for a lot of administrative tasks which provides an easy to use gui for almost everything. Although even with a gui you would need to know how some things work.

Haven't played around much with fedora. Settling with an rpm based distro, I usually just go with OpenSUSE. But it seems very stable. Whatever floats your boat.
 
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