I’ve just built a new PC, and decided to turn my old Windows XP PC into a dedicated, headless Linux server. One thing I’ve always wanted to have a server at home that could run apache and samba, but do other things like download torrents and serve media directly to my XBox 360.

I’m using RHEL5 here, but these instructions should work just as well for CentOS. My media directory is going to be called /media, and I’m doing all this via an xrdp session.

First, you need to install ushare to stream media to your 360:

yum install gcc
yum install libupnp-devel # from EPEL
wget http://ushare.geexbox.org/releases/ushare-1.1a.tar.bz2
tar -xjf ushare-1.1a.tar.bz2
cd ushare-1.1a
CFLAGS="-Os" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
route add -net 239.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 eth0
ushare -D -x -c /media

Once you have ushare up and running, your XBox 360 should be able to stream the files in your /media directory.

Now, for downloading torrents I suggest using Wine and uTorrent. I know, it’s not a native Linux app but the fact is the current generation of torrent clients for Linux are mediocre at best. uTorrent is fast, has a tiny footprint, and more features than you can poke a stick at. So until the Linux clients catch up, it’s uTorrent for me.

To install uTorrent on Linux:

yum install wine
wget http://download.utorrent.com/2.0.2/utorrent.exe
wine ./utorrent.exe /NOINSTALL

This should get uTorrent up and running. Next you need to enable the “Web UI” in the configuration settings, and create a username and password for remote access. Choose an arbitrary port like 8123. Once configured you should be able to access your uTorrent GUI remotely via:

http://<yourserver>:8123/gui/

Now, you probably have other PCs and laptops that you want to use to queue up the torrents on your server. That’s where the “Send to WebUI” firefox addon comes in, install this addon to any computer you usually use to browse torrents.

Once you’ve configured it with your server, and username/password, you can queue up torrents as easily as right-click -> “Sent to WebUI”.

If you don’t use firefox don’t worry, you can still queue up torrents via the uTorrent web-interface, it’s just a few extra clicks of the mouse instead of just one.

And that’s it. Queue up your torrents remotely, and watch them on your XBox soon as they have downloaded.

Yep, my gmail account has been hacked.

Please delete any messages you get from me trying to sell you pills (unless it’s Vitamin-C, which is really good for you).

On the weekend I put Win7 on the laptop and you know what… I actually like it.

It’s seems a lot faster. It could be because I’m running the 64-bit version (used to run 32-bit Vista), and could also be because somehow Windows is always magically faster after a re-install…

But it just seems to be a lot more polished. Things are in the right place, it’s fast, and it just works.

I did see in Dick Smith’s though the retail price is almost AU$500. I defintely don’t think it’s worth that much when you can get Linux for free, but as far as Windows operating systems go… it’s pretty good!

Trying out a new wordpress theme. Looks a lot cleaner than the old one that I made. Like the white background, makes reading the text easier.

Although that’s not usually a problem since I don’t blog enough!

EDIT: OK, so I’ve spent most of the day editing the theme, making it work with the slurper and vice versa. Phew, so glad I’m not a web developer. I remember when CSS first became popular, I remember how awesome it was and I converted my site’s HTML to use it for just about all the “style” my site had. Now CSS just seems so complicated, it hurts my feeble brain!