SqueezeCenter on the fit-PC Slim

It's a few weeks since I installed SqueezeCenter 7.2 on my mini Linux server. I'm delighted to say that it's working out great.

Music playback on my Squeezebox player is flawless. The responsiveness of the player and web interface is just fine.

My server is the recently released fit-PC Slim (512MB RAM), which I ordered diskless and fitted with a 250GB disk. It's running a minimal server install of Ubuntu 8.04 with a few services including SqueezeCenter.

In its current configuration, my fit-PC draws just 7 watts.

I think that's pretty terrific. I expect to get the power consumption even lower whenever I get around to disabling the WIFI adapter in the BIOS.

I only have one Squeezebox, so can't comment on the ability to serve multiple clients, though I have played to the Squeezebox and my laptop simultaneously without glitches. Also, no problem streaming music while performing other background tasks, like copying on new music files and transcoding from FLAC to mp3.

I reckon the fit-PC is a really great fit for SqueezeCenter.

Installing SqueezeCenter

Running SqueezeCenter to feed the Squeezebox music player is my old server's main duty. So it's first up for installation on my new fit-PC.

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to add

deb http://debian.slimdevices.com stable main

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install squeezecenter

The web interface is not available from my laptop until I restart the box (something to do with apparmor?). On restart, I can access the web interface fine.

SqueezeCenter installs mysql (unless you have it already) and SqueezeCenter then runs its own mysql instance, in addition to the default one. I don't want two mysql instances running on my little server, so I'll disable the default one for now:

$ cd /etc/rc2.d
$ cat README
$ sudo mv S18mysql-ndb K82mysql-ndb
$ sudo mv S19mysql K81mysql
$ sudo mv S17mysql-ndb-mgm K83mysql-ndb-mgm

Alternative would be to get squeezecenter to use the default mysql instance instead, and disable the dedicated squeezecenter one. Supposed to be possible. I'll try that whenever I end up with some other application which needs mysql.