No media center this time, but the dock and battery arrived

So, I receieved the dock and external battery for my Lenovo Thinkpad a few days ago, and I love them! The battery combination currently reports 80% and 15 hours left, after being in school for two hours and using the computer on the way here. The dock is a different story, and I am still working on getting the monitor inputs to work. However, I found a way of enabling the external monitor which requires minimal Xorg configuration, and will (hopefully) get me into a working triple monitor setup. The guide is avaliable here, if you're also a concerned Thinkpad user. So far, the external monitors does not work flawlessly, but I am working on it and expect to have a fully usable dual monitor setup by the end of the week.

One thing happened on the media center, I found a TV. It is a 46 inch Panasonic plasma, and I was very lucky to find it. We tested it with the Xbox 360 and a couple of movies, and I can say it was a very good deal. So now I can finally test the CuBox without having to move down to the bottom floor and borrow the living room TV. I have begun a little hacking on the Raspberry Pi, but just a little. The CuBox is the main focus for the moment, and a working XBMC and file server in the same unit is my goal. We'll see about that.

Building a home media center, part 3: New drives and Kerstin back online

So, I now have three 3 TB drives attached to the CuBox in a RAID5 array, which gives me a total storage of 5,46 TiB. That's pretty much all that has happened to the media center building since the last post, except that I managed to install Debian 7 "wheezy" on Kerstin, and use her as a headless music player. She refused to boot properly with the Debian 7 CD, though, so I used an old Debian 5 CD and went through two dist-upgrades. It was smooth, though time-consuming, and I have a working Debian 7 installation with Linux 3.2, MPD (music player daemon) and a mounted NFS share from the CuBox containing all the music. She boots perfectly fine headless, and also shuts down properly whenever the power button is pressed. I do have SSH access though, for system maintenance and updates.

Apart from that, not much has happened. I have a steady 8 MB/s transfer rate over wireless network from the server, and a good 30 MB/s over a wired connection. The hard drive stack is capable of MUCH more, but either the CuBox or the router is bottlenecking me and preventing that. Currently, I am happy with this setup, though photo browsing is considerably slower than it was when I used a local hard drive for the photos. But on the other hand, is anyone seriously surprised by that fact?

Lisbeth (my main laptop and workstation) have receieved an upgrade, with 16 GB additional RAM, now giving her a nasty 20GB of avaliable DDR3-PC12800 memory. I will tweak my ramdisk a little to take more advantage of this memory, as I think my Linux system will not use more than 6-7 GB of memory even during the nastiest multitasking scenarios. I do however not plan on running a 10+ stack of virtual machines at the same time as I am using the ramdisk fully, so allocating 14 GB to the ramdisk should be safe. Also, that allows me to place a full HD-quality movie in the memory, saving some power in both the laptop and on the server. I love having excess RAM!

Also, I wrote to a business-to-business company and asked to buy the slice battery and dock for my computer from them. They accepted, paymen is sent, and I expect delivery in the middle of next week. Exactly how I will get multihead displays working as desired will be a later question, but I am 100% certain it is possible. I have read up on some other people getting multihead to work with ThinkPads running Linux, and though it does not seem to be easy, it seems perfectly possible. Challenge accepted, my friends! At least three displays working should not be too hard.