forum.excito.org

Hi All, I thought I'd post this as a new Bubba2 user. I'm just coming to end of my second week as a user and on the whole I'm very impressed. So, I'd planned to put more detail into this but I've just not had time.

1: Monday, day 1. Bubba2 arrived, openned the small box, found lots of white bits, and smaller box. Openned small box and inside it one Bubba2 ... it is tiny. Mine is a 1TB box. I had what seems to be the normal problem ... missing parts ... the rubber feet. After a good hunt around they'd fallen out on floor. I only had a couple of hours in evening, so powered it on, signed on, created myself a userid, renamed it from Bubba2 (or whatever) to storm (all my PCs have had snow white and the seven dwarfs names until now but the kids have grown up so time for an upgrade of names!) All went perfect first go. Ran update as recommended, it seemed to go just fine. Changed IP address from dynamic to static (My router and server are static everything else dynamic).

2: Tuesday evening, copied all my mp3s to recommended location. Went to menu and enabled Squeezecenter, up and running fine, did couple of shutdown and boots to check it started automatically.. yes. Went off and conifigured four Squeezeboxes and all worked fine.

3: Wednesday evening, configured my two Slimp3s, this was more time consuming as I had to reflash the firmware. But they were also fine.

That was it for week 1 as I had no time over weekend to do anything, and having music working kept other family members happy.

4: Monday (week2) Copied all my photos to appropriate place and configured the photo application ... worked great. Created a common in storage and moved all common data there. common is where we as a family store all our shared data that is not music and is not photos.

5: Tuesday, configured three windows machines to mount cifs shares for photos, mp3s and common, took five minutes per machine.

6: Thursday, ssh into storm ... tried a few commands (see below).

Friday, today, not at work today want to do the following but trying to find best way:
1: Serve photo, music and common so automounted on Linux machines like happening with Windows, not clear best way to do this.
2: load a video and test
3: connect my weather station and get working. Need to fathom out how to install 'other non-Debian software'

Concerns and observations:
1: it truely is tiny ... need a kensington lock.
2: Squeezecenter concerns me, from command line I did top and it is using 35% - 40% cpu all the time. Cany one of the other users comment, is this reasonable? Today I'll track it with 2, 3 and 4 players running
3: So far, all in all, I really like it.

I missed this, I always thought Shuttle was a small form factor, but in this photo you see my shuttle, which had acted as my PC and our house server, sitting on it my weather station console and behind it the Bubba2. I've yet to put my power monitor on the Bubba2, but now I only have the Shuttle on when needed (like now), it was using 80W, I'm expecting less than 15 for the Bubba2
robin

On my Bubba|2 squeezecenter (idling) takes about 3% CPU but 30% memory - seems fair to me.
Charles

cmcevoy wrote:On my Bubba|2 squeezecenter (idling) takes about 3% CPU but 30% memory - seems fair to me.
Charles

Hmm, so random play on three squeezeboxes added about 20% which seems reasonable but my cpu usage for squeezecenter seems high, well over 10x yours.

Thank you Charles, will investigate further. robin

latest on my install. I'm still restricted on time I have available however updates as follows:

1: Did update today, first reboot since last post. Took about 10 mins - worked great
2: Squeezecenter was at 15% when idle - now dropped to about 9-10% - no explanation
3: Have had Bubba2 on power meter for a week now. Using about 15.8W - very happy.
4: Set up mail server today. I don't think the the instructions are very clear but it worked fine after a bit of fiddling.
5: Set up Horde. I like the interface but it is slow, will continue with Thunderbird once I've sorted out changes
6: Printing(Epson Stylus DX4050). From windows worked first time. From Linux (Suse 11.1) I cant get it to print successfully. Tried using CUPS but needs a password - not sure what. I dont understand enough about CUPS and Linux printing I decided. For some reason jumps from 'localhost' to 'bubba2' when I try to mod printer under CUPS. I get pages of what looks like PS control info. I've tried to follow the instructions on forum (I found some that looked good fit but I cant seem to get the Gutenprint Driver set for network printer.

Other than Linux printing ... still going well (When I have the time)
robin

Latest on install. I've not had much time recently to do anything. But here is what I have done.

1: Gave up on printing (my printer started having problems), so moved to a new wireless printer.
2: Converted family mail accounts to use Bubba. This is great as I have to be away quite a bit so accessing my email via internet. I really like the Horde interface, just wish it was a bit quicker.
3: Filesharing all common files across family, works ok for reading, some challenges with writing,
4: MH (I'd put a problem up about Perl module support. I changed my approach. I loaded the MH code for my home automation and it worked great. Seems like Debian support of Perl is much more via packages unlike Suse where I had to add alot of Perl support via CPAN.
4: Still concerns me a bit that Squeezecenter uses about 20% CPU when not busy, but with 3-4 Squeezeboxes running seems to perform fine

robin