Hey everybody,

I know these "which linux distro?" questions have been asked repeatedly here, but usually with a destop use focus, it seems to me. I was hoping you all could help me with choosing a distro for my music server.

My music server is running old redhat 6.3 or something. It's run without skipping a beat for a few years now. Basically, all it does is SMB and occasionally NFS to my web server, serving a very large mp3 collection on a software RAID array. I have a totally separate machine OpenBSD machine that is my firewall/web/email/dns/etc. server.

When I first did this, disk drives were too small for me to economically have a RAID5 array. I just got three 320GB disks and I am going to rebuild the machine with a 600GB software RAID5 array.

The computer sits in a closet, so I won't be using the console at all. The current machine doesn't have any X installed on it. My desktop machine is (unfortunately) an XP machine because of software I need to use everyday. I'm pretty much a command-line guy when it comes to unicies.

I've been thinking that it might be cool to set up X and a VNC server on the new installation. I could run linux programs in a nice X environment on my XP machine.

Here are my questions for the group:

1. Does the recent recommendation of ubuntu still make sense for my application? The most important aspects for me are the software RAID5 and the server stuff.

2. Is running X applications over the network even worth considering? If so, would I be better of with an X client on the XP machine, like Hummingbird? Are there alternatives to Hummingbird these days? Free ones? Is the whole idea stupid and should I just build a little mini-itx desktop and do that stuff with a KVM switch?

3. My X experience is quite dated. If you feel installing X is worthwhile for me, which desktop environment should I be using for compatibility with the most/best software?

Thanks in advance for the advice,

Jim

Yes, there are free X servers for Windows. I've used StarNet's X-Win32 trial for years now. There's also an open-source one at http://x.cygwin.com/ which I haven't used, but looks to have the right features. Oh, and use PuTTY on the Windows machine as a secure shell client. It has X forwarding built in (though not defaulted to on) that I've never had a problem with.

On the Unix machine, all you need are the X clients (that is, the programs that will be displayed via X: xlogo, xeyes, xterm, xcalc, etc.) and the client libraries. You don't have to have any X server software at all.

I'm personally of the opinion that all of the "environment"s suck. Just make sure you have all those client libraries installed and you should have no problem with compatibility. If you run an X server on your Windows machine, it doesn't really make sense to have one of those silly environments running at all anyway.

I use Ubuntu for my file server. It's debian-based and has all the volume management stuff out of the box. I actually run it as a mythtv box as well, so it serves 3 purposes:

1) NFS and Samba fileserver
2) MPD (music player daemon) based jukebox
3) Mythtv video jukebox

I've been extremely happy running Ubuntu on it, and I've tried lots of different linux distros in my time.

-- Gary F.

I wanted to thank you guys for the advice. I have the whole thing done, and now have a 583GB software raid 5 array for my music. I used debian sarge and I like it. Easy installation, though it would be nice if the installer let you make a few more choices (especially network choices), so you didn't need to reconfigure it after installation.

I also wanted to let you guys know that I installed the Xwindows portion of cygwin (which I was already using). I think this is the coolest thing. Now I have server xterms on my Windows machine. I also installed the prokyon3 program that was discussed in the General forum.

The cygwin Xserver seems to work perfectly. I need to figure out how to remap the Windows mouse buttons, though. I need to press both left&right together to get a right-click. Otherwise, its great. If any of you know about mouse buttons in cygwin, I use a Microsoft Intellimouse 5 button. I'd like left-click and right-click to be the same in X, and I'd like to press the scroll wheel (this is a button) for middle-click. Middle-click used to be the "paste" function years ago when I used X and I'd like that to work. Ideally, it would be cool if the scroll-wheel worked as well.

I also installed synaptic and Mark's right -- it's a killer tool.

Well, anyhow, thanks for the great advice. You guys are terriffic. I'm having a lot of fun with this.

I'll let you know what I think about prokyon. It doesn't appear to have the option to browse by source file location (like you do in mp3tag studio explorer), which is a huge issue IMHO.

Jim

Oooh, that would be cool!

Well, basically, my situation is that things are (for the most part) correctly organized by an Artist/Album/Track file structure, but my tags are a complete mess. I about to go re-tag the whole collection, so I'd like to be able to browse the collection by the file structure, and then correct the tags on a directory (or subdirectory) basis.

Prokyon has you browsing by tag information, rather than by file structure. This is the opposite of how I need to do it (at first, until the tags are good).

A common way that my tags suck is to have multiple spelling/capitalizations of the same artist for different albums. Since they're all in the same directory, if I could retag based on path/filename (which is how I've been doing it in mp3tag studio), then I can get them all to agree with the directory structure. I didn't forsee these issues when I started, and using CDDB resulted in a lot of inconsistencies when ripping. Also, I started doing this before there was a version 2 tag, so a lot of my tracks have only v1 tags (which are truncated), but the filename and path contain the relevant information.

Finally, It would be cool to multiply select artists and retag genres. This is also something I didn't have figured out when I made all of the mp3s.

Prokyon stores the filename in the database, and it must also store the directory or it wouldn't be able to update tags. Only filename is available for display, and you can't really use it to browse the collection.

Does this make any sense?

Jim

Definitely, if the tagging doesn't work, there isn't a point in the rest of it.

Jim