Re: [tlug] Ubuntu / EPIA / Media Player

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Mon, 7 May 2007, Edward Wright wrote:

> Not sure exactly what your aims are, but some thoughts...

Well, the main aim is to replace a dedicated media player box (one
of those little Digital Cowboy jobs that has an internal hard drive,
a remote control, and enough computer in it to do a very sad job of
playing audio and video files) with something that does a better job of
it (i.e., plays more reliably, and plays more formats). And do this with
a minimum amount of work, which I'm thinking means using pre-made kits
rather than building and configuring all of the software by hand.

> > 1. Is it running KDE or Gnome? How does one tell, in general?
> Why does one care, in general? Trash it and use fvwm2....

Well, it turns out one tells by dropping down menus until one sees an
"About Gnome" menu item. Doh!

But I'm curious because I see various kfoobar and gfoobar versions of
apps, and Ubunto tells me about some of them that they work well with
KDE or Gnome desktops. I wonder how much difference it really makes?

Anyway, I could trash it and use fvwm1 or fvwm2, but it doesn't really
seem worth the effort, since I don't do much work on this machine other
than run a few point-and-click programs once in a while. So having less
screen real-estate, less convenient ways of handling windows, and so on
is not a big deal to me here.

> > 3. What do I want to be using to play movies, music, etc? I installed
> > the MythTV package, and the music player accessory for it
>
> Why not mplayer?

I'm sure that that will be part of it, but mplayer itself doesn't deal
with playlists, remote control configuration, and so on and so forth.

> > 4. I'm going to be running the thing headless...

> If you just want to occasionally run an app, then maybe
> just an X server, and run the app remotely on your local desktop. (I'm
> guessing you don't need to connect over the Internet, so security isn't
> a big concern....)

Actually, that's the most secure way of doing it, since I can use ssh
forwarding for the X connection. Though this is behind a firewall, the
vnc thing makes me nervous, since there's only a human-typable password
between the machine and an intruder. I'll have to tweak it to use ssh
tunnelling.

But as it turns out, vnc gives me both of the other options, as well. I
somehow made appear (perhaps it was there already) a "remote desktop"
option in the System menu; enabling that lets me use vnc to connect to
the standard desktop, and there are instructions here:

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122402

for setting up a separate X server not connected to the screen that
gives someone a separate session.

> > 3. No ssh server installed by default. Is it just me, or is that getting
> > fairly silly?
>
> That sounds unbelievable, but if true, then silly is a gross
> understatement!

Well, I suppose that one can argue it's a "desktop" installation.
Still....

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974

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