Since the original iPad came out I've been thinking that I'd like to put together a small system to serve music and video to iOS devices in the car - and optionally outside of it during rest-stops, vacation, parties, etc.

My idea was to install SqueezeBox server onto a small PC running Linux and its own ad-hoc wireless network. The iOS device would connect to that network and running appropriate software, iPeng in this case, play back music. There are also a few decent video streaming apps now that such a system may also allow movie playback.

I haven't done much research into specific computers, but I'd always figured it would be one of the new mini systems. I was hoping for something with a 12V supply, but the one(s) I've looked at recently have 19v:

Zotac ZBOX Nano AD10: http://www.zotacusa.com/zbox-amd-e-350-apu-barebone-zbox-ad10-u.html

ZOTAC ZBOX nano VD01: http://www.zotacusa.com/zbox-amd-e-350-apu-barebone-zboxnano-vd01-u.html

The second one isn't available yet as it was just officially announced a few weeks ago. It's going to be cheaper than the first seeing as it's not as high performance. Saw a rumor of $130 for barebones price.

Any thoughts on booting such a machine from an SDHC card? I'd then use a 500B-1TB 2.5" drive for media storage. I have a 500GB hybrid Seagate drive sitting here that can't be used in my Macbook because it kills the battery too quickly.

I'd probably put VNC onto the system as well in case I needed to administer it without taking it over to a monitor and keyboard/mouse. Any opinions on installing Ubuntu for this kind of project?

Since the PC is 19V I won't be able to use a 12v-to-12v supply and the easiest thing to do would probably be to install an inverter allowing me to simply plug in the PC's power supply. I don't have any outlets in any of my vehicles already. It would be nice to get the system to properly shut down when the car is turned off and turn on when the car is turned on, so a relay of some sort will have to fit in here somewhere as well.

Any recommendations for other small systems?

http://www.mini-box.com/DCDC-USB

Programmable DC-DC converter with support for automotive mode (ignition sensing for motherboard shut-down). Input from 6v to 34v with output from 5v to 24v.

Seems like a good route so far.

I've got an Acer Aspire Revo R3610, which is small and neat. I'm currently using it as a Linux webserver. I don't know what the HD video performance is like, but it has ION. If you're streaming, you're probably not so bothered about that.

Until this weekend, if I'd wanted a small media box (and wasn't bothered about the fact that storage is not expandable), I'd probably have opted for the R3700, but I've moved away from Intel Atom. Read on...

However, I've just (this weekend) built an AMD E-350-based system (using one of these boards), and I think that the AMD chips are the way to go right now.

Aside: I've got mine built out as a NAS box, but I guess you're looking for something smaller, in which case the Zotac stuff looks pretty good.

Maybe a Fit PC is good for your needs? It runs from 12v, so it would be perfect for in-car use. As a matter of fact, the company even sells a 12 volt cigarrete lighter plug as an accessory. It also has a mini SD card slot, which you can boot from.

I have the Revo R3700 (Atom D525, 4GB). Ubuntu 64bit, with all the nVidia jazz installed and VDPAU enabled, 1080p H.264 decoding is very watchable. Watching Human Planet and Tron bluray rips skips a few frames here and there every 10 minutes, but most of the time is smooth as butter. I think some investigation and tweaking could improve things - its all playing over the network so I am wondering whether that has anything to do with it. I'm using VLC - I notice MPlayer is sometimes has better performance, so it might be flawless with that.

Anyway, I like the R3700 a lot. Definitely recommend something with ION2. I also hear that it works well with Windows.

Can you measure the power draw (current, or watts) at the wall plug (with or without drives) and post the results?

That's the most important specification for me, and practically none of the retailers provide it.

Thanks.

That one is cute. Lack of NVidia graphics means you'll be limited to running MS-Windows on it for HD media playback, at least for the next couple of years. Ditto for the Via based version.

I like the power consumption stats: 12W idle, 27W max.

I'm looking at new mobos / mini-boxes because of a KVM issue: I want to upgrade the KVM switch here to a USB/DVI-D version. But my Atom-based server has only VGA out (artificial marketing restriction from Intel for pure Atom systems).

So I either have to shell out $140 or so (incl. shipping) for a VGA-to-DVI-D converter gizmo, or replace the motherboard with something that has DVI-D (or HDMI) output. Nothing pure Intel will have that, so it's either AMD or Atom+Ion2.

The Ion2 graphics adds a bit of wattage though, but then so does the converter gizmo. So, looking for alternatives.

Thanks

If so then not everyone seems to have got the memo.

Peter

Good links, but both of those have much higher power consumption than with modern Atom chips. Eg. the current Jetway server is better than either of them. Bummer.

The AMD based boards also seem to be measuring in the 30-40W (idle) range, though nobody seems to be measuring things properly with a small PSU etc.

Mmmm.. found this encouraging article link: Upcoming Intel Atom boards with DVI.

Now I just have to find one of them somewhere.

Thanks for the tip on the Linux driver status, I wasn't aware of their state. However, this will be A-OK with me, as I'm only concerned with disk and network I/O performance. This will be strictly used for streaming, running headless.

I'm going to try that here (Zotac HD-ID41), probably this week. I've got a Class-10 4GB SDHC card, which should hold enough to boot to a GNOME desktop. Write performance is likely to be abysmal, but we'll see.

Not right now: I don't have a Kill-a-Watt and I gave back the one I'd borrowed. I'll see if they carry them at the Maplin near work tomorrow.

They did.

With 1xSSD (OCZ Agility 3), 2x500GB (WDC WD5000AAKS), 2x1TB (WDC WD10EACS and Hitachi HDT721010SLA360):

60W during startup; about 50W with the disks running, otherwise idle. About 26W with the disks spun down.

Please update with your results. I've seen there's a fork of Ubuntu called EasyPeasy specifically targeted for low power consumption. It might be worth my while taking a look at that.

I'm pretty sure I'd seen a Debian fork of some sort recently that minimized or eliminated disk writing (to the boot drive) as well.

Ran into hardware troubles yesterday and today -- something seems to have "gone bad" on the mobo of my main test system, so there's a bit of a delay on this project.

Also, I've decided I cannot cope with Ubuntu's latest abomination (11.10), even with the "GNOME Classic" (hah!) GNOME3 based desktop override (KDE4, anyone?).

So trying again later with Debian.

Cheers

Mmm.. dunno how useful this is to you or not, but I just now did "cat ubuntu-11.10-64bit.iso > /dev/sdcard" and then booted my ZBOX HD-HD41 from the SDCARD ("Live CD" mode). It took perhaps 60-90 seconds to get to the desktop, but runs fine (and quick) once there.

That same box boots to a (more minimal) desktop from SSD in under 30 seconds on an older Ubuntu.

I'm posting this note from within the "Live SD" environment.

Cheers

Okay, booted from the SD card "Live" system again, and it took pretty much exactly 2 minutes from bootloader to functional desktop. That's on the ZBOX, so a lot of time was spent decompressing the compressed installation image.

I imagine that a properly installed system on the SDCARD, read-only, should boot to a desktop in under a minute.

Cheers

Under a minute is good, 2 minutes not so much. 10-30 seconds would be much much better. I'd probably prefer to sacrifice any kind of GUI for faster boot time, so long as I can still get what I need up and running: Squeezebox server, SAMBA, WiFi in ad-hoc mode.

Squeezebox Server's primary linux version is listed as "Debian/Ubuntu" so I should be able to get a GUI-less Debian install all set up. Which will likely result in posts to the forum since I've never done that before.

EDIT.

I'm going to write down a few things I know I'll want to accomplish with the Debian install so I don't forget and so I might get some feedback or pointers to guides.

In no particular order - re-ordering for ease of installation would be another recommendation I'm open to.

1. Set up WiFi in Master Mode so it acts as an access point instead of a client. Fall-back is to to create an ad-hoc LAN. Specific SSID and a specific IP address

2. Set up DHCP server to assign static IPs to specific devices by Mac address and others dynamically on the WiFi connection.

3. Set up wired LAN port to be DHCP client, allowing me to plug the system into an existing network via this port. This port should obtain DNS and other information via DHCP. The machine would now be hosting its own LAN on WiFi and be part of another LAN on wired.

4. Set up a bridge to allow connections on the WiFi LAN to access the internet. Is this going to be possible?

5. Set up SAMBA and a couple of shares on the hard disk so that I can access them from wireless clients connected to this machine.

6. Set up same shares so I can access them from other machines on the wired LAN. Is this going to be possible?

7. RSYNC so I can create a schedule to back up all the music from my NAS. This box will then contain a mirror of the music share on the NAS. The schedule can be accomplished on the NAS where I already have other scheduled backup tasks.


The machine will only be occasionally connected via its wired port. This is sort of an "at home" or "visiting" use. Normally it would be used in a full portable manner and would only be running WiFi and wouldn't have access to the internet.

I realize that by using such a setup with an iOS device, if one has a data plan on that device, it would in fact be advantageous to run the network from the iOS device in a sharing/tethering mode and run the PC as the client. This would allow both systems to talk to each other while still being able to use the iOS device's 3G radio for internet. iOS can't use its 3G radio for internet when it's connected to a WiFi network as a client itself.

That's all normal, run of the mill stuff for a Linux box.

But really, what you just described sounds a lot like a decent wireless router with USB (eg. ASUS RT-N16), running Tomato/USB (Linux).

-ml

Pretty much, yeah. Except in a nice little package that holds a ton of memory and disk for running Squeezebox Server - it will have either 2 or 4GB of memory and either 500 or 1000GB of disk space, plus of course the SD card for booting. It's worth the extra cost to get everything in a small little box rather than hacking together an existing router into perhaps my own box.

Well the disk space is simply a USB drive plugged into the router.
But if you feel it really should have GB of RAM (??) then a bigger box will likely be needed. And the USB routers don't tend to have the fastest I/O paths, either.

ISTR that there are a few "router" distros for Linux with nice web GUIs. I wonder if one of those, but on a small Atom or AMD box, would have a good enough web setup to make this as easy as a DDWRT router?

Actually, google search seems to suggest there might be some nice "NAS Linux" distros, too.
Eg. http://www.openfiler.com

I have no experience with those, preferring to roll my own, but something like that might be best for your requirements.

Cheers

I've done a little more "google research" now, and one trend that's obvious is how nice little open source router/NAS distros tend to run for 3-4 years and then go totally commercial. Eg. ClarkConnect most recently.

They're still a great way to get started, especially for MS and Apple fanatics :), and they generally have much, MUCH better web GUIs than a general purpose Linux distro would offer.

But the reason I still "roll my own" using normal distros, is so I can continue to customize and upgrade them to my heart's content. And not be at the mercy of "did they include this feature", since a full distro generally has *everything* except the nice web GUI. Big time sink/investment with this route, though.

Cheers

I use OpenFiler. It works well, but the fact that it's built on rPath means that it's a pain to use for anything else, to the point where I finally just installed VirtualBox on it for other things that I needed, while keeping the native IO speed for OpenFiler itself.

The worry about going with such a distro is then getting SB server to install, possibly having to compile it myself and then hunt down dependencies, make mods, etc.

Originally I was thinking of simply using Ubuntu 11.10 and calling it a day.

If you find it easier to configure that stuff via GUI, you can set up your linux box to boot to desktop until you get your installation to a stable state, then disable the GUI stuff by changing the default runlevel in /etc/inittab, upstart, or whatever your selected distro uses. Alternatively, if you have an ssh server running on the box, you can also 'ssh -X' into it to run things that use a GUI.

Mark you have brought up an interesting point I hadn't considered before. I was planning to administer the box via SSH and/or by connecting it to a KVM and using it as a normal desktop (if I installed a GUI).

What I hadn't planned on was web GUI access to anything other than SB Server. Having a nice Tomato GUI on there would be awesome though.

Anyone know the best approach to accomplishing this? In other words, all goals. Using the ZBOX PC, with a fast booting and complete enough Debian install to support the requirements I've already covered, plus install a Web GUI like Tomato? Or Tomato itself if it could be added on top of Debian to control everything I would otherwise have to edit by hand in various config files.

Perhaps Webmin would do some of the things you want to do.

Thanks John. I've been looking at their site for a few minutes and it seems pretty robust. And complicated because of it.

Just added rsync to the list of requirements.

VortexBox is a Fedora-based distro that already includes SqueezeBox server and a web UI for managing shares and similar features. It doesn't include a web UI for routing, but I suppose that could just be done on the command line as I was planning to to originally with Debian. 15-20 bot times are quoted by the maintainer - that would be very nice.

Apart from that I found some router distros with two notable examples being:

Untangle: http://www.untangle.com/routing-qos

Zentyal: http://trac.zentyal.org/screenshots

No idea how easy it would be to get SB Server on either of those.