Kodi Community Forum
Building a hands-off HTPC/NAS - Printable Version

+- Kodi Community Forum (https://forum.kodi.tv)
+-- Forum: Discussions (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=222)
+--- Forum: Hardware (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=112)
+--- Thread: Building a hands-off HTPC/NAS (/showthread.php?tid=77665)

Pages: 1 2 3 4


- bipolar - 2010-08-04

Also, if I'm not running RAID, would it be OK if I partitioned off 20GB of my 2TB media drive just to run the OS? Would that be slower/cause any problems?


- davemex - 2010-08-09

Mike8913 Wrote:using this command "sudo /etc/init.d/xbmc-live start" i get caught witht he terminal telling command not found

i went browsing to the location in webadmin and xbmc is not there.......im at a loss

any ideas

EDIT: im completely stuck here, i cant even figure out where xbmc installed too

i found an occurance of an xbmc root file in "usr/bin", but i can figure out anyhing to do wiht it

when i type "sudo /usr/bin/xbmc start" i get 2 errors:

Error: unable to open display
FEH.py: cannot connect to x server

Sorry you've been having issues with the setup. I know I sent you this in a PM but for the rest of people reading this thread, I used the guide here to install XBMC and that might be a good starting place. I just thought of another thing though, with the specific error you're getting you may want to make sure you install the correct drivers for your graphics card. If you're just using an Intel graphics driver, you may also want to do
Quote:sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
sudo update-alternatives --remove gl_conf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf
to make sure it's not trying to use the wrong driver. Some people helped me out with this issue in another forum too.

I believe I also may be missing the fact that I installed xbmc-live in addition to what I had in the programs installed on the blog, which I will edit. The command to start it was supposed to be "/etc/init.d/xbmc-live start" instead of just xbmc start. Hope that gets you back on track!

EDIT: I changed this post to include some more specifics once I dug them out of another thread I went looking for help in.


- davemex - 2010-08-09

bipolar Wrote:Also, if I'm not running RAID, would it be OK if I partitioned off 20GB of my 2TB media drive just to run the OS? Would that be slower/cause any problems?

I'm sure you could run a live version of Ubuntu off of a thumb drive but have never done it so I'm not 100% sure on how to proceed with that! As for using part of the large drive, just make sure you put the system partitions at the beginning of the drive when you do the setup and let the large storage sit at the end. The only problems you'd probably see here would be that it would boot a little slower than if you had a faster dedicated boot drive but if you leave the system on all the time you wouldn't have many problems!


- I12crash - 2010-08-12

Dave I just want to say thanks for all the info you have put out so far. I'm far from computer illiterate, but linux is new to me. I've watched a lot of videos, and I really think I'll like it once I learn my way around it. I'm currently building a system similar to yours, but using SSD for system drive and found a mini ITX case that holds up to 6 drives. I've got everything except the four 2TB drives I plan to buy in the next few weeks. I can't wait to dive in and get this working. Thanks again for all your help.


- davemex - 2010-08-12

I12crash Wrote:Dave I just want to say thanks for all the info you have put out so far. I'm far from computer illiterate, but linux is new to me. I've watched a lot of videos, and I really think I'll like it once I learn my way around it. I'm currently building a system similar to yours, but using SSD for system drive and found a mini ITX case that holds up to 6 drives. I've got everything except the four 2TB drives I plan to buy in the next few weeks. I can't wait to dive in and get this working. Thanks again for all your help.

Ohh man, SSD boot drive and an array of 2TB drives *drool*. Big Grin

Yea my advice to anyone after trying both Windows installs and Linux, is that if you want a system that actually does stuff automatically, you've got to go Linux. I think I'm in a similar boat experience wise, I'm no novice but I had almost no Linux exposure going into this project. The amount of help out there for Linux is absolutely amazing though. Anything I ran in to was easily Googled for a solution! I see people out there that put some really slick looking Windows boxes together but then to hear that they have to close window A and open window B to watch a DVD (or anything that makes the system look like a computer and not a device) just makes me cringe. It just never felt seamless using Windows, while with Linux it really does.

Good luck with your project and let m know if any questions come up that I might be able to help with. Also, POST PICS! I'd love to see the finished product!


- bipolar - 2010-08-13

davemex Wrote:Ohh man, SSD boot drive and an array of 2TB drives *drool*. Big Grin

Yea my advice to anyone after trying both Windows installs and Linux, is that if you want a system that actually does stuff automatically, you've got to go Linux. I think I'm in a similar boat experience wise, I'm no novice but I had almost no Linux exposure going into this project. The amount of help out there for Linux is absolutely amazing though. Anything I ran in to was easily Googled for a solution! I see people out there that put some really slick looking Windows boxes together but then to hear that they have to close window A and open window B to watch a DVD (or anything that makes the system look like a computer and not a device) just makes me cringe. It just never felt seamless using Windows, while with Linux it really does.

Good luck with your project and let m know if any questions come up that I might be able to help with. Also, POST PICS! I'd love to see the finished product!

yup, i'm in the middle of setting up my seedbox sort of thing and linux is great. crontabs make it easy to schedule my tasks that way my roommates don't get angry at my torrents taking up the bandwidth 24/7. i'm still waiting on some parts for my HTPC, but once that gets set up, i'm thinking its going to be amazing.


- bipolar - 2010-08-13

also, is there a way to set up a site that will let me access torrentflux/webmin from anywhere, not only on my network? it would be nice to be able to check in on things while im on vacation or whatever.


- I12crash - 2010-08-14

OK, having trouble. This has been quite a learning experience, but quite a frustration at the same timeHuh

OK so during torrentflux setup I get an error on the tables portion. Here is what is says.

Code:
torrentflux-b4rt 1.0-beta2 - Setup
Database - Create Tables

The installation will now attempt to create the database tables required for running torrentflux-b4rt.

Error: Cannot connect to database.

Any suggestions? I'm stuck at this point.

While I'm asking about this let me ask this as well.

I have not yet purchased my RAID drives yet. I'm not going to have to reinstall to set up the RAID and do this all over again am I?


- nickvda - 2010-08-15

I have to say very nice guide Dave, I have been wanting to do something similar for quite some time for my parents, they are slightly computer illiterate.

Just a few things I am wondering if you know how to add or recommend. (I mainly use windows for my personal xbmc, but I really like your linux setup).

Any way to put in a simple Dvd/blu ray ripper so that basically you put it in, get a popup saying Play or Rip, pick language/subs/etc and it automatically rips to the movie folder?

Also do you know of a good media organizer/scraper that can be used in conjunction with your setup to clean and download movie nfos and pictures for linux. On my windows machine I use eventghost with therenamer and Ember Media (work pretty well), not sure if there is something similar to that for linux.

Appreciate any input.

The idea would be also to make it completely easy to use and where I would require to do almost 0 interventions, kind of like you Tongue

Again great guide


- davemex - 2010-08-16

bipolar Wrote:also, is there a way to set up a site that will let me access torrentflux/webmin from anywhere, not only on my network? it would be nice to be able to check in on things while im on vacation or whatever.

I use dyndns with my router to create an address to my dynamic IP. So you could register mysite.dyndns.org and that address will always get you to your system even if your IP changes. You need to make sure your router supports dyndns though. Also, make sure you have port 80, 443, and any of the other ports these programs use forwarded to your server from your router, otherwise they'll just time out. You could also just open up port 80 and then use apache's configuration to forward the sites to the correct port from their folder by putting something like this in the httpd configuration file:

<Location /sabnzbd>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
ProxyPass http://localhost:9090/sabnzbd
ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:9090/sabnzbd
</Location>

So now instead of having to go to http://myserversite.dyndns.org:9090/sabnzbd to add some downloads to my sabnzb server, I can just go to that address/sabnzbd without having to use that port (which wouldn't get through my work's firewall anyways!). Make sure you use the correct port for the correct application.

I12crash Wrote:OK, having trouble. This has been quite a learning experience, but quite a frustration at the same timeHuh

OK so during torrentflux setup I get an error on the tables portion. Here is what is says.

It sounds like you aren't putting in the correct information for the MySQL database. Make sure the address is something like "localhost" and then the user name would be "root" and the password would be the root password you used when you set up MySQL. You may want to go into the configuration and make sure you set up the user name and password so Torrentflux's setup can get in there and make the tables it needs to run. This is crucial for some of the other applications like Ampache too (if you decide to use those).

As for the RAID drives, you shouldn't have to do this process over again. All the system data will be stored in these system partitions and the RAID drive can just mount into that system and be ready to go!

nickvda Wrote:I have to say very nice guide Dave, I have been wanting to do something similar for quite some time for my parents, they are slightly computer illiterate.

Just a few things I am wondering if you know how to add or recommend. (I mainly use windows for my personal xbmc, but I really like your linux setup).

I'll take these one at a time...

nickvda Wrote:Any way to put in a simple Dvd/blu ray ripper so that basically you put it in, get a popup saying Play or Rip, pick language/subs/etc and it automatically rips to the movie folder?

I have looked into this and it would be awesome but I haven't found a solution that is straight forward enough to implement. I wanted to do this for my Dad who has a massive DVD/BR collection but so far the process seems to be a little more manual. Huh

nickvda Wrote:Also do you know of a good media organizer/scraper that can be used in conjunction with your setup to clean and download movie nfos and pictures for linux. On my windows machine I use eventghost with therenamer and Ember Media (work pretty well), not sure if there is something similar to that for linux.

Well currently I've been happy with just the info/pictures pulled in by XBMC itself. I think it does a fantastic job at collecting this stuff for you. Have you tried setting it up to do this instead of using all the scrapers? I know that with the NZB downloads that NZBS.org does a great job of collecting all the nfo and artwork files for each of the movies but I don't know how to piece them together with the actual download. If you find something though I'd love to hear about it!

nickvda Wrote:The idea would be also to make it completely easy to use and where I would require to do almost 0 interventions, kind of like you Tongue

Yep! That's the goal! Completely hands off (except for picking out the media). Glad it was helpful for you but I wish I had more input on the DVD ripping/scraping side of things. If I find anything else out about these I'll definitely pass it on. Please do the same if you find a seamless solution! Big Grin


- nickvda - 2010-08-16

Yea im gonna look at finding a dvd ripping solution thats easy and runs on linux, because my parents have alot of dvds, so need something thats pretty straight forward.

The main personal issue I have with xbmc doing the scraping itself, is if you have another client pc connecting to the "movie database", you have to rescrape everything again. The way i have it setup on my personal pc, is that ember media manager scrapes, images, nfos, trailers (if available) and any pc on my network can pull them (after xbmc has "scanned the content") which is much faster than rescraping. Also lets me double check that all nfos are actually correct, and to manually scrape fanart for those rare, odd movies.

Im almost sure there is a media scraper for linux, just need to find one (if anyone knows of one, please let us know!!!). Haven't really searched for one, as my personal machine is windows.

Will let you know if I find a solution to these things!!


- nickvda - 2010-08-20

Surfing google I got brought back to these forums and found a script by linuxluemmel for xbmc, that seems to do what we want to do.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=52615&page=36

Please try it out on linux dave and let us know how it works, (currently dont have linux on this pc, might get it running in the next week when I have time)!


- davemex - 2010-08-20

nickvda Wrote:Surfing google I got brought back to these forums and found a script by linuxluemmel for xbmc, that seems to do what we want to do.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=52615&page=36

Gonna try it out on windows, and see how it works for our goal. Please do the same for linux and let us know how it works!

Great find! Unfortunately this linux HTPC doesn't have a CD drive. This looks so tempting I might just have to put a linux partition on my older test system and give it a try! I'll let you know how it works! Big Grin


- nickvda - 2010-08-20

davemex Wrote:Great find! Unfortunately this linux HTPC doesn't have a CD drive. This looks so tempting I might just have to put a linux partition on my older test system and give it a try! I'll let you know how it works! Big Grin

Let me know if you give it a go!! Not sure how soon ill get my linux running


- GJones - 2010-08-26

davemex Wrote:Great find! Unfortunately this linux HTPC doesn't have a CD drive. This looks so tempting I might just have to put a linux partition on my older test system and give it a try! I'll let you know how it works! Big Grin

External USB DVD drives are cheap.