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Hey all

I have a PIII 450 w/ 368mb of RAM in my lounge that is used for media. I had
to steal the 80gig out of it, and replace it with a god awful 3gb 5.25"
bigfoot, that has slowed it down no end.

It has a 32mb GeForce II in it that outs to the tv for watching movies etc.
It plays ... just.

I have a celery 433 sitting here with a spare hard drive...

My question is: Would it be possible to setup one of them (probably the
celery) as a thin-client? Just for media really .. I'd like to use linux for
this, is it a major to setup the server? I have a bootable NIC for it. Has
anyone tried this or has one working? Is it even possible to browse a
windows network and play media with that setup?

Sorry if it's a bit vague but this sort of thing is new (yet intruiging) to
me

Thoughts and constructive comments / websites please!

Thanks in advance,

Matthew

In article <Bj%8e.19903$>, "Matthew" <> wrote:
*SNIP*
>I have a celery 433 sitting here with a spare hard drive...
>
>My question is: Would it be possible to setup one of them (probably the
>celery) as a thin-client? Just for media really .. I'd like to use linux for
>this, is it a major to setup the server? I have a bootable NIC for it. Has
>anyone tried this or has one working? Is it even possible to browse a
>windows network and play media with that setup?
>
*SNIP*

You can definitely browse Windows networks and play media, the question
is if a celery would be up to doing the latter. If it can't do it under
Windows, don't expect anything better under Linux.
Setting up the server is pretty easy. Install samba, configure the
shares you want, and you're good to go.

You've got two choices. You can use the celery as a server, using the
P3 as a less-than-thin client. Or you can use the P3 as a server, and
use X forwarding or similar to run applications on it with the output
presented to the celery for display. The latter is more complex, but
probably a better use of resources.
Do a google for "diskless linux" to find far more about the subject than
you ever wanted to know.

--
Matthew Poole
"Veni, vidi, velcro...
I came, I saw, I stuck around"

My real e-mail is mattATp00leDOTnet

Matthew wrote:
> Hey all
>
> I have a PIII 450 w/ 368mb of RAM in my lounge that is used for media. I had
> to steal the 80gig out of it, and replace it with a god awful 3gb 5.25"
> bigfoot, that has slowed it down no end.
>
> It has a 32mb GeForce II in it that outs to the tv for watching movies etc.
> It plays ... just.
>
> I have a celery 433 sitting here with a spare hard drive...
>
> My question is: Would it be possible to setup one of them (probably the
> celery) as a thin-client? Just for media really .. I'd like to use linux for
> this, is it a major to setup the server? I have a bootable NIC for it. Has
> anyone tried this or has one working? Is it even possible to browse a
> windows network and play media with that setup?
>
> Sorry if it's a bit vague but this sort of thing is new (yet intruiging) to
> me
>
> Thoughts and constructive comments / websites please!
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Matthew
>
>

The p3-450 is better than the cel 433.

Since you have a slow hd, yes you could "thin client boot" using it. A
bootable nic thin client is not that easy. Or use its cdrom drive to
boot. You will need a linux bootp/dhcp server to run off.

www.ltsp.org

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:55:23 +1200, Matthew wrote:

> Hey all
>
> I have a PIII 450 w/ 368mb of RAM in my lounge that is used for media. I had
> to steal the 80gig out of it, and replace it with a god awful 3gb 5.25"
> bigfoot, that has slowed it down no end.
>
> It has a 32mb GeForce II in it that outs to the tv for watching movies etc.
> It plays ... just.
>
> I have a celery 433 sitting here with a spare hard drive...
>
> My question is: Would it be possible to setup one of them (probably the
> celery) as a thin-client? Just for media really .. I'd like to use linux for
> this, is it a major to setup the server? I have a bootable NIC for it. Has
> anyone tried this or has one working? Is it even possible to browse a
> windows network and play media with that setup?
>
> Sorry if it's a bit vague but this sort of thing is new (yet intruiging) to
> me
>
> Thoughts and constructive comments / websites please!
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Matthew

I have set up a diskless box to pxe boot knoppix from a debian server like
this
http://www.babytux.org/articles/howt...netknoppix.php

Or you could just run a cd distro like http://www.dynebolic.org/ or some
of the others here
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
You would be better off running the player locally rather than on the
server as a real thin client setup.

Matthew wrote:
> Hey all
>
> I have a PIII 450 w/ 368mb of RAM in my lounge that is used for media. I had
> to steal the 80gig out of it, and replace it with a god awful 3gb 5.25"
> bigfoot, that has slowed it down no end.
>
> It has a 32mb GeForce II in it that outs to the tv for watching movies etc.
> It plays ... just.
>
> I have a celery 433 sitting here with a spare hard drive...
>
> My question is: Would it be possible to setup one of them (probably the
> celery) as a thin-client? Just for media really .. I'd like to use linux for
> this, is it a major to setup the server? I have a bootable NIC for it. Has
> anyone tried this or has one working? Is it even possible to browse a
> windows network and play media with that setup?
>
> Sorry if it's a bit vague but this sort of thing is new (yet intruiging) to
> me
>
> Thoughts and constructive comments / websites please!
>

You appear to be describing Knoppmyth - a media oriented client and
server distribution. Bear in mind that if you aren't doing encoding in
real time, the hardware requirements can be relaxed quite a lot.
Although MythTV is TV oriented, it can be used to just play media, music
included.

http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html

Other media based distributions are available, some will run from a live
CD, which is an easy way of getting started:

http://distrowatch.com/geexbox
http://distrowatch.com/movix
http://distrowatch.com/dynebolic

With the amount of ram that you have, you may be able to load the entire
distro into memory and then run it, which should make it quite fast.
Live Cds are an excellent introduction to Linux, they make things very easy.

HTH, cheers

Matthew wrote:
> Hey all
>
> I have a PIII 450 w/ 368mb of RAM in my lounge that is used for media. I had
> to steal the 80gig out of it, and replace it with a god awful 3gb 5.25"
> bigfoot, that has slowed it down no end.
>
> It has a 32mb GeForce II in it that outs to the tv for watching movies etc.
> It plays ... just.
>
> I have a celery 433 sitting here with a spare hard drive...
>
> My question is: Would it be possible to setup one of them (probably the
> celery) as a thin-client? Just for media really .. I'd like to use linux for
> this, is it a major to setup the server? I have a bootable NIC for it. Has
> anyone tried this or has one working? Is it even possible to browse a
> windows network and play media with that setup?
>
> Sorry if it's a bit vague but this sort of thing is new (yet intruiging) to
> me
>
> Thoughts and constructive comments / websites please!
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Matthew
>
>
You will most likely have to expererment a lot. Now of audio I Use
slimserver on a linux box I have run it on a p100 trough to a p200 as a
pure server solution, for receiving boxes with complete os work fine.
The Server can keep up streaming up to 4~6 streams. now the compleat os
boxes can be win9x, win32's, linix but did most of the testing using
damnsmall linux and knoppix of cd drive. worked well could even play
vids off a samba share A K6II-500 did the best playback there are some
video streamers aval for linux to. havent tried that yet. TV out would
work fine too.

what I am using now is the playback machine now is the server it is
streaming to its self and can stream to other machines as well using a
Slacware distribution as it was easer to optimize. It can even do its
own ripping, and work with out the network ie on its own.

--
http://cooze.co.nz home of the RecyclerMan aka Robert Cooze

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___\ ____/ ____/ /___/ /____/ /_/ ___\ ____/ /_/ /_/ |_/ /___/

Matthew wrote:
> I have a celery 433 sitting here with a spare hard drive...
> My question is: Would it be possible to setup one of them (probably the
> celery) as a thin-client? Just for media really .. I'd like to use linux for
> this, is it a major to setup the server? I have a bootable NIC for it. Has
> anyone tried this or has one working? Is it even possible to browse a
> windows network and play media with that setup?

it's easy if you have some idea on how it all works, which it sounds
like you kinda do.

sorry I can't think of any supporting websites, I might put up my work
documentation of thin client, but I have to pull out all references to
work before I could do that.