Firstly, I had quite a lot of trouble with the whole headless thing. I think a step by step guide to do this would probably be helpful! After setting up the HDA normally and checking everything worked ok, I ran nano /etc/inittab to set up the server to start at runlevel 3. I wanted it to all start up automatically in case of power failure so wanted autologin without a password and with all the services starting up.
Trying this I came across a problem - autologin using the edits to /etc/gdm/custom.conf quoted in this thread does not work at runlevel 3. I gather it only works to log in to the full x window or something. Anyway, this was important as none of the services seemed to work until someone was logged into the machine, so I couldnt go headless yet!
After a bit of googling, I found this post which included a very simple method that did work at runlevel 3:
edit /etc/event.d/tty1 to change
Code: Select all
exec /sbin/mingetty tty1Code: Select all
exec /sbin/mingetty --autologin user tty1I had previously used the "Passwords and Encryption Keys" thing to set an empty keyring password, not sure if this was important in the end but anyway the machine was logged in automatically on boot now.
This leads to the second problem. Everything works perfectly at runlevel 3, apart from vncserver. I could not get it to work properly, although it had been working fine in test with everything connected. Some troubleshooting using SSH to the machine:
1. service vncserver status gave "Xvnc is running"
2. However, using portqry from my windows machine, I could see that the HDA was "not listening" to the expected TCP port. That is, somehow the service was running but not doing anything.
3. Running vncserver gave response "started applications specified in .vnc/xstartup" and details of the desktop session. Portqry then showed that the HDA was now listening, and running TightVNC from Windows worked a treat.
I had run chkconfig vncserver on from root user already. I did it again anyway and also from my username for safe measure, but I dont know if I've fixed it (and cant be bothered restarting the HDA!). I am guessing it has something to do with the order in which services are started up or something like that.
I'm sure there were other things I've worked through but I cant think of anything else that took ages to figure out. I did a lot of googling and reference to threads on this forum or the wiki. One thing I found out which is not related to Amahi at all is that my motherboard won't start up without a video card connected, even if the BIOS is set to stop on no errors. Which sucks because the video card is not needed at all to run headless, and is a massive waste of energy and quite noisy (the HDA is set up on a five year old ex-gaming rig - Athlon 3500+ with a Gigabyte GA-K8N SLI board and 7600GT video card). It used to be overclocked a bit but I've set it all back to factory settings for this purpose. I will investigate further... maybe I can disable somehow or buy a dummy card or something. Or install a new motherboard etc I suppose, but half the point of this exercise was to make use of the old pieces in a redundant machine!
Finally, some general thoughts on Amahi from a new user:
- you dont need to hear this one, but as a whole Amahi is amazing! It was relatively easy to set up and is so much more powerful than the simple network I had going before. I'm streaming media to my ps3 and ipod, have a much improved storage/print setup, sabnzbd works way better than anything I've used previously to manage usenet downloads... everything I've tried so far is just fantastic, and I've just scratched the surface!
- one that will probably offend you guys as expert linux users, as a Windows user the terminal is pretty scary. I had used it to set up Ubuntu on the earlier network and appreciate how powerful it is to have complete control like that, but it has a steep learning curve - basically I needed to google everything I did at first. And I have to wonder why you would prefer VI over anything with a decent UI! I found nano a much easier editor to use. I didnt use gedit as I had read somewhere that it stuffs up permissions, or something. Anyway nano was ok once I got used to it and I figured it would be helpful to get used to it so I could work with a SSH link to the server.
- Amahitunes is great. One extra thing I do though for PCs, which I worked out for the old server, was that different machines can share a library on the share drive - you just have to make the share drive the default music location for all machines, and hold [shift] when starting iTunes for the first time to point iTunes to a library on the share rather than on the local drive. This works great for me and means I can sync my iPod from a laptop which has no local music stored.
Anyway, mark me down as a happy customer!
