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SqueezeCenter and RAID

Got problems with your B2 or B3? Share and get helped!
jsh
Posts: 21
Joined: 16 Sep 2008, 12:10

SqueezeCenter and RAID

Post by jsh »

Just got my Bubba Two and watching the blinking light while it formats the drive. According to the User's Manual, there is support coming for both SqueezeCenter and RAID-1. I am very eager to have both....what are the expected timeframes for these updates?

Thanks.
Hammer
Posts: 124
Joined: 02 Oct 2007, 13:37

Post by Hammer »

Agree, squeeze center is one of the main buying points for me, have ordered a squeezebox duet.

REALLY want that to work off of the B2!
carl
Posts: 474
Joined: 07 May 2008, 04:41

Post by carl »

Hammer wrote:Agree, squeeze center is one of the main buying points for me, have ordered a squeezebox duet.

REALLY want that to work off of the B2!
And hopefully there will be one available in some weeks :) I'm working on it, though still it isn't ready for release. Tohugh if you are a daredevil, and can live without official support besides full reinstall, we have a working version in our unstable repository, though as I said it is fully unsupported, so it is on your own risk.

/Carl
/Carl Fürstenberg, Excito Software Developer
http://www.excito.com
support@excito.com
matse
Posts: 48
Joined: 12 Aug 2008, 15:55

Post by matse »

Hi,

lovely, my new Bubba|Two is up and running!

Managed to get SqueezeCenter working as well, and it's performing a lot better than on my old Linksys NSLU 2 - it's worth the few additional Watts.

Unfortunately I didn't see the above post before I had already installed SqueezeCenter the hard way, i.e. by downloading the software from SqueezeDevices homepage, identifying and installing a series of components on which the software depends, configuring it, and fixing a few "bugs". This took me several hours! Will consider a clean install once the software is included in the Bubba image.

Mats
Hammer
Posts: 124
Joined: 02 Oct 2007, 13:37

Post by Hammer »

Mats,

Care to share how you did it?
Sounds like a task that is way out of my league, linux noob that I am.

Cheers,
Hammer
matse
Posts: 48
Joined: 12 Aug 2008, 15:55

Post by matse »

Sure, I can try to describe how I did it! Remember though that what's more important than understanding what one is doing is a strong determination that it shall work. =)

You may want to have a look on the following guide as well: http://wiki.debian.org/SlimServerHowto

From my memory:

Downloaded SqueezeCenter 7.2 from http://downloads.slimdevices.com/Squeez ... er-7.2.tgz and uploaded on Bubba

Enabled Shell Login for my user account on http://bubba/admin/users

Opened a terminal connection to Bubba using Putty.exe (free tool) on my PC

Logged on as me, then switched user account to root using "su" command. Password is excito.

Created directory /usr/share/squeezecenter/ and extracted the SqueezeCenter packge to there using the tar command.

Created a system account (with whose privileges the server will run) by issuing the command: "adduser --system --home /usr/share/squeezecenter --no-create-home --gecos "SqueezeCenter" squeezecenter"

Tried to start the server by issuing the command "./slimserver.pl --user=squeezecenter" in the squeezecenter directory. Doesn't work of course. Think I got some message that I have to download some perl modules using the script build-per-modules.pl that ships with squeezecenter.

Tried to download missing perl modules by using the command "./Bin/build-perl-modules.pl". Think I had some problems here, and had to come back to this step.

Downloaded a series of packages by using the apt-get command.

apt-get install build-essentials
apt-get install libexpat1-dev
apt-get install libgd-gd2-perl
apt-get install libtemplate-perl

Reran the build-perl-modules script.

Tried to start the server again, and it complained over a missing "autosplit.ix" I think. Fixed this by copying it from one of the directories that were created by the build-perl-modulels script I think.

Tried to start the server again, and it complained about something named "Encode::Detect::Detector". Could fix this by commenting out line 40 in the file ./Slim/Utils/Unicode.pm using the text editor nano.

Created a series of directories in which the server will write files:
/etc/squeezecenter
/var/cache/squeezecenter
/var/log/squeezecenter
and made squeezecenter (system account) the owner of these by using the chown command.

Now the startup command looks like this:
slimserver.pl --cachedir /var/cache/squeezecenter --prefsdir /etc/squeezecenter --logdir /var/log/squeezecenter --user=squeezecenter

Tried to start slimserver again, and it complained over an erronous file relating to mysql. Fixed this by replacing the file ./mysql/errmsg.sys under the squeezecenter directory with one found in the mysql installation directory.

Tried to start slimserver again, and it keeps complaining over some perl modules. Fixed this by removing directories (and files) under ./CPAN/ relating to Template, Encode, GD and JSON.

Think I had to install a few additional perl modules using the CPAN tool approach.

Tried to start the server, and it seemed to work I think. I was surprised that I didn't need to setup a database in mysql, that seemed to happen automatically. It responded to the squeezebox remote, and I could connect to http://bubba:9000/ in my browser. The rest of the setup could be done from the browser.

Then I created a script file /etc/init.d/squeezecenter that is supposed to startup the server automatically when starting the Bubba using this as a template: http://wiki.debian.org/SlimServerHowto

I made the script executable using chmod command, and registered it with the OS using the "update-rc.d squeezecenter defaults" command. Now it starts automatically when Bubba powers up.

Let's see if this helps :)

M
carl
Posts: 474
Joined: 07 May 2008, 04:41

Post by carl »

I uploaded a new version (based on upstream 7.2) to claire today; mostly i at last managed to make it reuse the available mysql instance instead of starting one own; Though still I feel that it uses too much memory (a whopping 60 MiB of precious RAM), and I still need to fix/test the firmware exclusion issue (at last test with 7.1 the player did complain if there wasn't any firmware available; At the moment, the firmware is actually included, but that is a violation of the licence from Logitech, so don't tell anyone :)).

/Carl
/Carl Fürstenberg, Excito Software Developer
http://www.excito.com
support@excito.com
WifiBob
Posts: 1
Joined: 07 Oct 2008, 04:59

Post by WifiBob »

I think you will not get the memory usage dow that much. On all other NAS systems (QNAP, Synology), SqueezeCenter and MySQL take about 80-90 Mb RAM.

The firmware issue I have seen before. It tries to get the .bin file. But SlimDevices have changed the location of www.slimdevices.com/downloads to downloads.slimdevices.com.
It redirects now, but maybe that's the problem?

Bob
carl
Posts: 474
Joined: 07 May 2008, 04:41

Post by carl »

WifiBob wrote:I think you will not get the memory usage dow that much. On all other NAS systems (QNAP, Synology), SqueezeCenter and MySQL take about 80-90 Mb RAM.

The firmware issue I have seen before. It tries to get the .bin file. But SlimDevices have changed the location of www.slimdevices.com/downloads to downloads.slimdevices.com.
It redirects now, but maybe that's the problem?

Bob
That issue has been solved, it was both that squeezecenter would need to be able to read the .version files, and had to be able to write to the Firmware directory.

/Carl
/Carl Fürstenberg, Excito Software Developer
http://www.excito.com
support@excito.com
marre
Posts: 3
Joined: 15 Oct 2008, 03:48

Performance of SqueezeCenter web ifc on Bubba Two?

Post by marre »

A question for the few of you already running SqueezeCenter on Bubba Two:
I read about the web interface performing badly on the Original Bubba, so I'm kind of curious about if this has improved since Bubba Two has a better performing CPU and more RAM.
I would be very pleased to get any input on performance issues regarding SqueezeCenter and Bubba Two!

Have a really nice day now!
/
Marre
bert
Posts: 5
Joined: 18 Jul 2008, 08:27

Post by bert »

I'd also be interested in any real-world reports on how Squeezecenter performs on the Bubba 2...
mad
Posts: 43
Joined: 11 Oct 2008, 14:48

Post by mad »

OK then here is a real world report...

The web interface is not really as fast as you'd like, but it works. Switching from the standard skin to fishbone made a HUGE difference also unloading uneeded plugins made some difference. But it's still slow.
Haven't tried tuning the database yet there might be some gain in that but the limited memory may well make it impossible.

Streaming music to a local squeezebox is very impressive! Load average while streaming mp3/flac is well bellow 1 (while doing other stuff too). Changing songs is not instant but the lag is hardly noticeable, changing albums takes a while longer but isn't bad either.

Streaming/transcoding to my computer at work worked as far as the streaming goes. Load was a bit higher but nothing alarming. The web interface however acted kind of strange at times, my best guess is that it was due to timeouts. Haven't had much time to play around with this though.

Last but not least i might add that my Bubba is kinda custom, most of the Bubba stuff it came with is ripped out (such as web server, horde and whatnot). I basicly run postfix, postgrey, pure-ftpd, rtorrent, samba, squeezecenter, mysql and some basic *nix services.
jsh
Posts: 21
Joined: 16 Sep 2008, 12:10

Post by jsh »

So, any update on when there will be a Bubba Two update that includes SqueezeCenter?
Hammer
Posts: 124
Joined: 02 Oct 2007, 13:37

Post by Hammer »

@carl:
What does it mean "I uploaded a new version to claire"?

Is that something we can use?
If so, where to get it and how to?

(I tried the long and hard way described earlier in the thread, but that didn't work, of course, since I'm a noob at linux.)

Cheers,
Hammer
MagnusJonsson
Posts: 88
Joined: 26 Sep 2008, 04:18

Official release?

Post by MagnusJonsson »

"Very reliable sources" (on a recent party) tells me that there is an official release for Slimserver with B2 soon to be announced. If this is true, how near in the future is this going to happen? Since I've just purchased a Squeezebox Duet I was wondering if I should wait a few more days or if I should venture down the road of trying to install it myself using ideas given in this forum.

Magnus
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