Linux: My Brief History

I am currently trying to get a Software Requirements Specification written, so there is no time to play with the RPi today, instead I can give a quick background to my life with Linux - when in fact I should be writing something about a conceptual description of an e-commerce website.

Roku Network Music Player

About 8 years ago, I had a couple of Roku Soundbridge network music players in the house and was looking for a way to serve music from my MP3 library to these devices without running my PC 24/7 - the PC was probably consuming about 180W.  The Roku forums mentioned a device which could fulfil the music server needs while consuming no more than 10W. The NSLU2 by Linksys is a Network Storage Link for USB2.0 Disk Drives, which was intended as a low cost file server to share your external HDD and USB flash drives with the rest of your network. However, since the underlying system was Linux-based, the open-source community managed to flash it with a modified operating system image called uNSLUng which essentially turned it into a small Linux computer, which could run a web server, network monitor, print server, and many other applications beyond its original intended use.  

Linksys NSLU2

For my purposes Firefly Media Server, the DAAP music server which was developed to run on the uNSLUng "Slug", was the extent of my requirements.  Notwithstanding, the procedures for unslinging and then installing packages pushed me away from the comfort of GUI-driven computing for the first time since being introduced to the DOS prompt when dinosaurs still roamed the planet.  The file structure was alien, the commands powerful but cryptic, and the terminology baffling. When you are presented with a textual interface awaiting your input without any prompt other than '#', what do you do next?  Ultimately, with the help of the vast wealth of information posted on various fora and despite losing all of that MP3 collection at 4am one February morning, my needs were met - low powered music server available 24/7!

Interest piqued, I salvaged an old HP Compaq computer which was cobbled together using RAM from here, disks from there and installed Ubuntu Server onto it with a view to learning Linux and maybe having a file server as well as some other services available within a home network - the Slug being relatively underpowered was unable to cope with more than two or three servers without struggling (music buffering, file server hanging, web server time-out and so on). That PC is still acting as my home server, and  because it is going to be running anyway, the services previously running on the NSLU2 have been moved on the it although it consumes about 80W.

So things have come fully circle and the NSLU2 has been retired, but I intend to resurrect it as a web server which would be isolated from my more valuable files.  In the meantime, Ubuntu has also become my preferred desktop environment.