Excellent link. I was looking at the Linkstation a few weeks ago but didn't like the price. i only wanted it as a portable drive. Running slimserver on it is a great idea and makes for a really killer music stream when combined with a Squeezebox or Roku Sound Stick.

Bruno

Yeah, it only holds one drive, so that may be a problem for 400GB. Some people are working on a Gentoo or Debian installation from scratch. So far, I've just been running it from my chrooted Debian install (kinda like my Empeg). I can't add kernel modules yet (so no CDROM access for ripping) but it serves most of my purposes (DHCP, NTP, DNS, SMTP, HTTP, SNMP, SMB, LPR -- any other acronyms??) out the box with Debian and apt-get. Plus, it has double the memory and a more powerful processor than the NSLU2. Its a little more expensive, like you said, it already holds the HD, so one less box to hassle with.

Checkout the gmane group which mirrors a Yahoo group for much more info.

Well, fair enough. That old Dell 133 I have is very quiet and is in a mini-tower form factor. Holds two disks easily, 4 if you convert 5.25 bays to 3.5. The old P133s don't have a CPU heatsink, so the noise is coming from the PSU, most likey. If you can find an old machine that is small enough for you, you could always spend $40 or so on a very quiet PSU. Check out silentpc.com for some options.

Just my $.02.

J

Hmmm. I'll try to find that URL... Sorry, that was off the cuff.

Jim

Well, it's been a while since I've looked at those sites, and they've changed. I think silentpcreview.com was the one I was thinking of. I think I may have been thinking of this article, which is now rather old.

It seems to me that Mark Lord's new network server (the one in the tin cookie box) is fanless and silent as well. I don't remember the details of that machine.

You can put your 3.5" IDE drives in acoustic enclosures ( this place sells them) that reduce their noise. That, combined with something like mlord's machine might be the ticket.

I have the music server in a closet with my network server/firewall machine, so I don't really care about the noise. What I want to do (time and $$$ permitting) is to make a completely silent cookie-tin like computer with a flash drive and wireless that just NFS mounts the music partition from the server in the other room. The other alternative is to buy a squeezebox and install that server software on my existing machine.

I've been using mp3blaster as my linux console mp3player. I wanted a console player so I didn't need a big machine running X and a mouse, etc, etc. This player has some really cool functions, in my opinion (shuffle groups, for instance). You can make mp3blaster work with lirc (linux infrared remote control), so that you can control it with a standard remote (or even the empeg remote, I suppose). I haven't done that, but if/when I make the silent little flash-drive player machine, I will probably get that working.

I really think that linux with software raid and Samba is the answer, at least for the server side. You can use the server as the player, if it is quiet enough, or use a variety of different players, from Windoze machines with Winamp, to squeezeboxes, or other linux client-only player machines.

Jim