I think it’s been quite too long since I’ve posted on a Linux forum, or even built a Linux box. Never the less I have a couple questions for you up to date tuxes. I along with a lot of other posts here, am going to be building a computer/server.
It is mostly going to be made for a media server with a lot of space for growth. One of my questions is; are there any internal Blu-Ray drives/burners that are currently supported out-of-box? I’ve searched the forums for anything Blu-Ray and came up with nothing and even went to the HCL portal and searched through “Optical.” Both ways I came up empty handed.
The last question is more of a discussion. I will be connecting to this server from different types of hardware. I will have a monitor for it so I can have a nice little 50GB drive for Windows to play a game or two, I’m sure the girlfriend would appreciate that. :shame:
Is there anything you guys think would be fun to try or implement into this monster tower? I’m open to all ideas here. Thanks in advance guys!
-Ant
As far as I can tell, Blu-Ray in Linux is a no go for the average user. A few people claim to get it to work, but the copy protection code must be re-broken on a regular basis in order to see the latest movies. Even people with all valid equipment can have this problem if they do not have an internet equipped player.
What I do is to simply maintain a dual boot computer with Windows and Linux as my multimedia computer. If I have any media type that can not be used on Linux, I switch to Windows, like to play a Blu-Ray movie of which I have a few. For the most part though, I still just buy DVD’s and use it in Linux. So I am ready if I need to be. I am not sure that Blur-Ray will ever over take the regular old DVD in today’s world.
What would I buy that was fun to try on Linux? Well, if you are into hardware, then I would buy a new AMD six core CPU, motherboard, eight gigs of RAM and a new 10,000 RPM 600 GB hard drive from WD (About $280 US for the HD). That is what I would do.
Thanks for the clear note jdmcdaniel3. That’s sort of a bummer about Blu-Ray although not a huge deal.That six core CPU does seem to be calling my name though, hmm. Yeah I’m sure I’ll have a Windows box on their as well, so if need be I’ll boot back and forth. Thanks again for the input!
-Ant
check this out , its not really native but … For drm stuff you might also need DumpHD - a HD-DVD / Blu-Ray Decrypter - Doom9’s Forum . asfaik not even the ps3 with linux installed was able to play BR (please correct me if I am wrong)
Also I have another question, now that I think of it. When it comes to formatting the drive what format should I run with. Basically I want all PC’s to be able to connect totally fine to it with no problems. That’s the majority of the users that will be accessing it. Besides, if they’re running Mac or Linux they’ll know how to find the plugin or hack to write to it anyways.
The only thing I’m worried about is file size restrictions. I’ve been using FAT32 on a media HD I have connected to an XBOX at the moment. Just totally realized that it has the 4GB restriction. Would not like to run into this down the line.
Thanks again guys! I believe next week I will be buying most of the parts
Well, if you’re using it as a file server, it doesn’t really matter what format the drive is. The default of ext4 would work fine. You’ll just need to setup a samba server so everyone can access it. It can be setup with our without user/password authentication. Using a windows formatted drive wouldn’t give them access to it unless you physically unplugged it and plugged it into their system. The samba server should work with Linux/Mac/Windows fairly smoothly.
You could also install a bittorrent client on there that has a web console that can search for torrents, then download to the server. Then, instead of each user downloading to their own computer tying up the bandwidth, they can download directly to the server.
Love it! You totally answer my next question. Definitely going to want to put some authentication on this guy. And that Samba server shouldn’t be hard to setup either.
Thanks a ton guys for the info thus far. I will be sure to return with some details or any more questions. I hate being this excited at 4am.
-Ant
i am unclear where you want to draw the ‘play with cool stuff/learn things’ versus ‘have it work first time’ line (and, if the play with cool stuff thing goes wrong, it’ll probably be spelled F.R.U.S.T.R.A.T.I.O.N.)
The things that I would consider would be (& my taste in cool stuff may be very different from yours):
ZFS
using a flash device with bcache to speed up a conventional hard disk
use a 4k sector drive (and really get it working right)
lots 'o cores, lots 'o ram, lots of virtualisation
some kind of ‘and what can be done with integrated graphics’ thing
every one of those has some disadvantage(s)
ZFS isn’t quite mature, yet. It certainly mostly works, but is that enough? But I’d like to try ‘zero cost’ snapshots and all that cool stuff. And the performance is sometimes better and sometimes worse, depending on what you actually test and I don’t know how it works out on balance.
The review I’ve seen of bcache (and there is another alternative which has a name that I’ve forgotten) shows unimpressive performance (relative to my expectations). And, if its just that my expectations that are wrong, maybe its just not worth trying, as SSDs are still a bit expensive, even in small-ish sizes. Maybe, it is possible to do something with ywo disk drives and put the journal for each one on the other, where caching (with relatively small journal sizes) helps speeds. Maybe not.
Everyone complains about the struggle to get 4k sector drives working correctly; maybe if I tried it, I’d just become one more of them. But it shouldn’t be all that difficult…should it? And there just isn’t a big payoff from 4k sector today, but it seems to be the future (or should I just get one of the drives that ‘just works’ without these extra issues). And avoid WD.
The cores thing is a bit difficult; AMD with loads of real cores versus Intel with a lesser number of cores, but each core able to run two threads? AMD with a possible upgrade path, Intel with better IPC now? AMD with cheaper mobos (and possibly better on-board graphics) or a new (and therefore overpriced?) Intel arch with on-chip graphics…although, for every previous Intel graphics generation, the pre-launch BS has sounded good and, errr, the reality hasn’t quite lived up to that?
Graphics cores can do useful computation, but I don 't really know enough about it. AMD vs Intel’s new parts? whose libraries work best? Or does it need to be a real separate graphics card to give real number crunching performance? And what would I do with it?
Sorry, that’s probably not very useful…but you did ask!
