Ubuntu Server

Kyser Soze

Any of you have any experience with Ubuntu Server? I have been thinking about installing it on a server I am putting together. What I NEED from my server is the ability to watch all my movies, listen to all my music, store all my stuff, and have remote full remote access and give some other limited remote access.

Any advice? Also, I am currently a complete noob to Linux and know basically nothing about it, so what would also be the best way to learn and learn quick.

prashantkadre

To watch a video in the terminal, you would need mplayer installed. You can get it from the Ubuntu Software Center or run this quick command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install mplayer


Now that you have mplayer, you are ready. The only catch is that it should be a cartoon. Regular movies have too much color and details to play well enough to tell what’s going on. When you are ready, run the following code in the terminal, replacing MovieName with the filename of your video

jabirali

The Ubuntu Server Edition should be able to accomplish all of these goals; you might want to refer to the official installation guide during installation.

1. File/Movie Server
This can be done in many ways. The simplest is probably to just setup an FTP server, which grants you remote access to the stored files. Different levels of access can be granted to anonymous users and users who have authenticated with a given username and password. You can use normal video players (vlc, mplayer, etc) to stream videos over FTP.

Another alternative is to setup an SSH server (see below) on the server, and use sshfs to mount a location on the server locally.

2. Music Server
I recommend installing the Music Player Daemon, which can be used to grant various levels of server control to different remote users. You can then stream music with one of the numerous MPD clients, available for all major platforms and toolkits - including web clients which can be run from the server itself.

3. Remote Access
If you mean access to running a shell or programs on the server, you should install the Secure Shell Daemon. You can then use these commands to either open a remote shell on the server, or open a graphical application (e.g. file manager) on the server:

ssh username@hostname
ssh -X username@hostname /path/to/app

You can also use PuTTY to do something similar from Windows.

mfillpot

Ubuntu server or even the desktop edition can fit your needs.

To build a multimedia server checkout the guide at http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/feature-linux-media-server-using-ubuntu-810-2009065/.

As for file storage, if you wish for windows to mount it as a shared drive you can use samba, otherwise utilizing vsftp as an ftp server should be sufficient

Next is the remote access, you can use ssh for cli based access or you can install a vnc server to give you remote desktop access.