Cool Toys

This section is all about the cool toys I intend to use in future projects...

NSLU2

This tiny network appliance connects USB 2.0 hard drives directly to your Ethernet network. You can connect up to two stand-alone USB disk drives of any size, and access them from anywhere on your network. You can even plug a USB flash disk into the Network Storage Link, for a convenient way of accessing your portable data files.

• Linksys home of the NSLU2
• Linux for NSLU2
• Storage for the NSLU2

I have finally installed this box with OpenSlug and been adding packages for various usage... Filesharing is not an issue, just install Samba and NFS and every OS I use can copy to and from the slug, there is a catch however, due to the lightweight CPU in the slug, transfer speeds vary greatly.

Another thing I intended to use the Slug for - Media Center - was quite easy to setup, but again the CPU became the bottleneck for various reasons:

• MySQL required way too many resources to do anything else (including file sharing).
• Apache + PHP need so much resources, that pages take too much time to load to be usable.

Ah well, at the moment I am running uShare and ccxstream to serve audio/video files to my XBox Media Center and I am quite happy with it thusfar.

Another project came to mind, after reading this page and this one... Using the slug to play audio streams on my stereo and being able to control it with my mobile phone :)

Mega180

* Hi-Fi Audio + Performance PC + Home Theater
* AM/FM Radio Tuner
* Audio CD Player
* MP3 Music CD Player
* Color LED
* Provided Remote Controller
* TV-Tuner Function (Optional)
* 6-in-1 Card Reader Function (For Deluxe version)
* SRS

• MSI Home of the Mega 180

I have been running Windows and Linux on this box... It has a nice formfactor and a great look, but it’s not what I expected it to be... All fancy features are either windows only or proprietary (LCD/Remote both use the Bluebird VL+ chip which is not supported by linux). The HiFi sound is routed through the line-in of the soundcard, which is kinda annoying when booting linux for the 1st time.

• Windows XP

It takes some effort to install the box as not all the hardware is autodetected by the windows (xp) installer. Once you get everything going the MSI applications are pretty sluggish.

• The MSI remote is really unresponsive (in both PC and Hi-Fi mode)
• Changing channels, switching radio stations, browsing pictures takes ages in the MSI Media Center.

• Windows XP MCE

Windows Media Center Edition is not supported - due to the fact that the TV card from MSI is not supported for starters - so I gave this up.

• GeeXBoX

[http://www.geexbox.org/] is a linux/mplayer based multimedia distribution which runs great on the Mega 180, but modifications are (were) needed for optimal performance.

• Nagios
  • [http://www.nagios.org/]
  • [http://www.nagiosexchange.org/]
  • [http://www.oreon-project.org/]

• Cacti
  • [http://www.cacti.org/]

• OCS Reports
  • [http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=English]