Hi everyone,
I have been thinking about wireless music using a Squeezebox or Roku for some time now, but never got around to implementing it. A recent thread in Audio Central got me thinking about it again.
So I went ahead and bought the Linksys NSLU2, a device that makes USB drives accessible over a network (Dell $75.00). For storage, I bought a Western Digital 250GB hard-drive (from Dell, $95.00).
My plan was to install Slimserver on the NSLU2, and then serve up music stored on the 250GB hard-drive, which would be connected to the NSLU2.
To be able to install Slimserver on the NSLU2, it has to be first "unslung", a process that requires flashing the existing firmware (a variant of Linux), with "Unslung", a variation of the Linksys firmware, developed by the NSLU2 Linux development group
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/. What I have succeeded in doing so far:
1. Flashed the NSLU2 with the latest version of Unslung. This process changes only the NSLU2 flash memory. Before any software like Slimserver can be installed, you have to transfer all the bootup information to a separate drive that is connected to one of the ports of the NSLU2. The reason being the flash memory on the NSLU2 is quite small, and any attempt to install additional software in it will most certainly result in making the NSLU2 unusable.
2. For this separate drive (not my music storage drive), I used a 1GB USB memory stick. This memory stick is plugged into Port 2 of the NSLU2. It had to be formatted to use the ext3 filesystem. Then all the boot-up information (in the NSLU2 flash memory) was transferred to this memory stick. So now, the NSLU2 boots up from the 1GB flash disk.
3. Installed Slimserver 6.5.1 in the memory stick. This process took the most time. Slimserver is not available as a package that can be installed directly (at least not v6.5.1). One has to build it from the source files. This requires downloading and installing a number of development tools. I ran into a couple of problems for which solutions were found in the Slimdevices forum and also in the NSLU2 Wikis.
So now, I can bring up the web interface for slimserver on my laptop. It is very sluggish though. The next step will be to make NSLU2 recognize the 250GB drive, which I will plug into the other port of the NSLU2. I do not have a squeezebox yet, and will be using Softsqueeze. Hopefully the response from slimserver will be acceptable.
I am ripping my CDs into FLAC using Exact Audio Copy. So far, I have ripped a grand total of ONE CD, but it is one of my favorites - The Clifford Jordan Quartet Live at Ethell's.
Thanks for reading so far. If you would like to go this route and have any questions, I would be happy to help out if I can.
Ashok
