prostheticHead.Network

Last weekend Dan and I spent a good chunk of the weekend setting up my mediaBox to run Linux. I had been running Windows XP and was not using any sort of media centre software as none really worked how I wanted them too or would crash often. I got used to just using a mouse, Explorer and VLC to play movies so I thought why not put Linux on it and do the same thing.

Our first challenge came from just trying to install Ubuntu it would boot into the live CD I ran the installer and formatted the partition I created as ext3 but when Grub was attempted to be installed at the end it would fail. Dan and I spent most of Saturday trying to work out why Grub would not install. Dan tracked it down for some reason when the Ubuntu installer formatted the drive as ext3 it didn’t set the partition to that file system too so Grub got confused it could not see any Linux file systems so it would error out.

Once we got Ubuntu installed we did the basics like setup the mounting of the NTFS partitions and Samba to share the drives. Once we had a basic system that could play movies and be remote administrated with VNC and SSH we looked at downloading tools.

So that the mediaBox could download all the latest Linux isos for us easily we setup two very useful tools Deluge for torrents and sabnzbd+ for NZBs. Both of these programs have web interfaces and both use a pick up directory so you can drop in a torrent file into a shared directory from any PC in the house and the mediaBox will download it for you. Deluge was easy and worked like a charm. Sabnzbd+ was not easy it took a lot of work to get it running as a daemon we used a Forum post on the Sabnzbd page to work it out when I find it again I will post it here.

Now that we have videos playing, Linux isos downloading and files sharing it is running just like my old Windows XP setup but I want more.

I have been looking at media centre software for Linux and was not impressed with Myth or Linux Media Centre (LMC tried to format all of my drives and would not let me change that). I do like Elisa I’m very impressed with its simple and fast interface but it did not feel right. What has impressed me the most is the Linux version of XBMC. It seems very stable now and lots of work is being done to make it work just as well as it did on the Xbox. I recommend anyone with a Linux mediaBox to check it out.

I recently purchased a shiny new Dell XPS M1530 and it come with Windows Vista. I had not played with vista much but was shocked at how slow its windows file sharing transfer speeds are.

I spent a full day copying over my games and such from my old desktop computer at a pitiful 2MB/s after complaining to anyone that would listen I was simply told vista is slow get over it and that it was much worse before SP1.

On one of my there must be a way to fix this hunts on Google, Dan and I found something that looked promising and it worked.

To get full speed in windows file sharing simply open a command prompt in Administrative mode (You can do this by typing “cmd” in the Start Menu and pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter to execute).

Type “netsh” and press Enter. You are now in the netsh command mode.

Type “int tcp” and press Enter.

Type “set global autotuninglevel=normal” and press Enter. The command prompt should return “OK”.

Type “exit” to return to the normal command prompt.

You Must then restart your computer!! (This is important!)

(Above taken and edited from http://www.ocmodshop.com/ocmodshop.aspx?a=900)

On the original source they say to disable it but from what Dan and I found by default it is set to Highly Restrictive and simply setting it to normal fixes the issue but if you want to typing “Set global autotuninglevel=disabled” will disable it entirely.

With our testing we got speeds faster than in windows XP after setting it to normal. Leave a comment with your results!