Design my apartment!

[Wombat]

Hey guys. I'm moving into a new place. I only have the one computer listed in my sig right now. I'm planning on getting broadband, and probably run it through a dedicated switch. I'd like to run some networking cable from my study into my bedroom and living room. Allow some access points in these other rooms to control a central music server that I will set up. I want to keep these tertiary machines cheap, simple and (especially in the bedroom) quiet.


Let your imaginations run (but without taking my wallet with them) !

[birdy]

assuming y ou want a music server to hold the music for the other machines to play then i would have the following:

A cheap motherboard with onboard video or an old PCI graphics board. Possibly would even risk a pc chips board.
A duron 750 or cellery 733 (depends on the board really)
128mb ram
Any hard disk will do as long as its big enough
A NIC
a box to put it in.
borrow your keyboard , mouse and CD rom drive for setting it up.

I would run Linux on it, probably mandrake 8, and control it through an SSH connection using Putty from a windows machine. You should be able to set up a shared directory on the box fairly easily for storing your music files. Once it's running you can remove the monitor, keyboard and mouse and hide it in a cupboard. If you must switch it off then you will need a wake on LAN capable NIC so you can restart it without getting it out of the cupboard.

I am planning on a similar setup myself soon so i will let you know how i get on

As for where to put your furniture, thats up to you but i would recommend not having the TV facing the window.

[Wombat]

So, 20 people have looked at this, but nobody has any ideas? C'mon! It's shopping time!

No advice on switches, even?

[Dilitante1]

a Linksys router to handle broadband connection, as for setting up a music center from your PCs, i am planning to create a file server that will house my music and i can play anything from any room i have a PC in
8D


remember WinAmp will run on a low end PC
=D

a simple setup no?

-pickle

[Wombat]

Well, Iif I'm going to have computers in the bedroom, I'm trying to go with something quiet. Either a fanless 486/P5 or maybe even just an x-term.

But a major issue is how I'm going to transmit the music. Has anyone here used those wireless X-10 transmitters? Otherwise I'll need a full PC to run xmms or mpg123, and have my server do on-the-fly encoding to play CDs.