Really small and quiet Linux music server

[steveww]

Whilst reconfiguring my home network and server utilisation I can across a great little device called Linksys NSLU2 (aka slug). Alas it is no longer available new but eBay has loads of them. Why would you want one I hear you ask?

 

In standard form it runs a mini Linux and acts as a NAS via Windows share (SMB). However it has been well and truly hacked and can easily run a pretty full Linux system. I have put Ubuntu server 9.04 on mine and it runs as a NFS server. Out of idle curiosity I checked and yes MPD has been ported to it and yes it does recognise and support my TerraLink-X USB -> SPDIF dongle. Decompressing a FLAC file and piping it to a USB port is not going to tax its limited CPU power. It is a tiny box that does not have a fan and could be run off a pocket USB hard disk or a couple of thumb drives.

 

I am now seriously considering using one of these instead of my recent Acer Revo and making the Revo my new mail server.

 

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

 

[Dan Gravell]

They're pretty cool, but you can run into trouble if you start doing taxing things like transcoding. For instance, I tend to store everything in FLAC and transcode to MP3 on demand when required (for portable players etc). This can be pretty heavy on these devices in my experience.