I have a 1.5TB external hard drive(with its own power adapter) and three computers at home, it was not convenient if I want to get the files or save them to the external storage. So I planned to make my external hard drive to be shared in the home network:
There are at least three ways to set up this:
1) NAS drive;
2) Router with USB support;
3) File server;
I chose option 3 because I also need a light-weight computer to connect to my LCD TV, ideally can play movies.
After a long time googling, I bought HP Thin Client 5710 from the internet. Here are the specs:
Transmeta Efficeon 1.2GHz
256 MB Flash memory,
256 MB DDR SDRAM (upgraded to 512MB)
(24 MB of system RAM is reserved for processor usage)
ATI® Radeon 7000M
10/100 BaseT Fast Ethernet,
4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 serial, 1 parallel, 1 PS/2,
Sound: Internal amplified speaker, full 16-bit stereo, 44 kHz sample rate
Weight: 1.4Kg
Operating Temperature Range 0 to 40° C
The advantage of using this Thin client for this Job rather than a full size PC are its size (small and unobtrusive), tiny power consumption and the fact that the unit is totally silent ( apart from its Audio Output ).
I uses Ubuntu at work, so I would like to install one of the Ubuntu edition or light weight Debian. Because the internal flash memory is too small(256MB) and it already has a Genuine Windows XP Embedded SP2 installed which I don't want it to be ruined. So I will need to install Linux to the USB flash drive and boot the system from there(This needs USB2.0 support, if your Thin Client only has USB1.1, don't try it).
I tested the following Linux editions:
1) Ubuntu 10.10 (too slow, not usable);
2) Xubuntu 10.10 (better but still slow);
3) LXDE (fast, but can't play movie well);
4) Puppy Linux (fast, good);
5) Slax (fast, good);
I picked Slax as my Thin Client OS, I likes its module management system.
The basic Slax version includes the following modules:
001-core.lzm
002-xorg.lzm
003-desktop.lzm
004-kdesktop.lzm
005-koffice.lzm
006-devel.lzm
007-firefox.lzm
To build a file server that the files can be used by the Windows computer, you will need to install samba-3.4.4.lzm. After set up, all my computer's can access the external hard drive now through the wireless network, even play movies.
For the Thin Client itself with Slax, kplayer is enough to play AVI movies well without video latency issue, you are also able to load subtitles if you needed. But by default it does not support some video format like rm,rmvb etc. Install codecs-essential-20071007.lzm will load most of common codec in the system to allow you to watch different formats of movies.
There were still some problems after using Slax USB version, here are the solutions:
1)
The major problem I had from Slax was KDE mime type error, if you have this problem you will not be able to open any drives or folders as it will prompt an "open with" dialog box.
The mime type error is caused by a PosixOVL error. If you're running Slax from a FAT partition, it can't save file permissions the way it'd do on a Posix file system like EXT2 or XFS. PosixOVL is supposed to compensate for that by saving the permissions in individual files, but it's still quite buggy at this point.
The obvious solution is to not save your changes to a FAT partition. The default Slax installation package already include a file called slaxsave.zip, unzip one of the files inside like save1024.zip(include a 1GB size slaxsave.dat file), this file represent a XFS-partition-image. Please see ReadMe file or click here for more information.
2)
512MB memory for this Thin Client is not enough sometimes, so you need to create a swap "partition" for the system. The "partition" here doesn't have to be a real physical one, we can make a swap file as a virtural swap partition. The steps are:
1 dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hdc1/slax/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
2 mkswap /mnt/hdc1/slax/swapfile
3 swapon /mnt/hdc1/slax/swapfile
4 (adding this text in /etc/fstab file )
/mnt/hdc1/slax/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
(reference: how can create swap(virtual memory)in-live-slax)
