Does anybody have good suggestions for a Low Cost, Low Power PC (Board) to run LMS & iTunes 24/7?
I have the Squeezebox Touch and as we all know, to get the best potential out of it, you need to have the LMS running continuously on a separate (tiny) PC like the R-Pi. You could also consider any other PC and even a WOL activated machine to save power. However, from experience we know that WOL is not always 100% reliable and a normal PC consumes to many power for the LMS purpose and for running 24/7.
As such, having the R-Pi running 24/7 is the best and most elegant solution!
But, now consider this: I want the same 24/7 availability of iTunes to drive media streams any time to Apple end-points like iPad, iPhone and Apple TV2 or TV3. Also here you do not want to depend on a full-fletch PC or iMac running all the time or by using WOL (to wake up a sleeping PC). Also here you want a low-power consuming machine for running iTunes.
Running iTunes requires an iOS or Windows OS and cannot run on a Linux platform - and that is a bit the challenge now. So a Linux based low-power PC like R-Pi is not the first logical choice.
The requirements for the '24/7 LMS & iTunes PC' would be like this:
- Able to run both, LMS and iTunes (latest available releases) on 1 operating system.
- Run this 24/7 continuously.
- Very low power consumtion.
- Basic virusscanner taking regularly automatic its updates from the Net.
- At least one USB port for external HD.
Does anybody have good ideas?
The machine shouldn't really require to have an advanced graphics chip or connections for monitor, mouse, etc but perhaps it can be of use for others. Perhaps you would like to have sufficient graphics capabilities on the machine anyway (but then likely it will consume much more power under full-use) to be able to use it to run as well mediaplayer free-of-charge SW like XBMC: for 1080p HD movies.
I have the Squeezebox Touch and as we all know, to get the best potential out of it, you need to have the LMS running continuously on a separate (tiny) PC like the R-Pi. You could also consider any other PC and even a WOL activated machine to save power. However, from experience we know that WOL is not always 100% reliable and a normal PC consumes to many power for the LMS purpose and for running 24/7.
As such, having the R-Pi running 24/7 is the best and most elegant solution!
But, now consider this: I want the same 24/7 availability of iTunes to drive media streams any time to Apple end-points like iPad, iPhone and Apple TV2 or TV3. Also here you do not want to depend on a full-fletch PC or iMac running all the time or by using WOL (to wake up a sleeping PC). Also here you want a low-power consuming machine for running iTunes.
Running iTunes requires an iOS or Windows OS and cannot run on a Linux platform - and that is a bit the challenge now. So a Linux based low-power PC like R-Pi is not the first logical choice.
The requirements for the '24/7 LMS & iTunes PC' would be like this:
- Able to run both, LMS and iTunes (latest available releases) on 1 operating system.
- Run this 24/7 continuously.
- Very low power consumtion.
- Basic virusscanner taking regularly automatic its updates from the Net.
- At least one USB port for external HD.
Does anybody have good ideas?
The machine shouldn't really require to have an advanced graphics chip or connections for monitor, mouse, etc but perhaps it can be of use for others. Perhaps you would like to have sufficient graphics capabilities on the machine anyway (but then likely it will consume much more power under full-use) to be able to use it to run as well mediaplayer free-of-charge SW like XBMC: for 1080p HD movies.