Back…Sort Of

My old Linux box keeled over and died on me on the weekend, I’ve narrowed the problem down to either a bad motherboard or CPU, and it’s far too old to bother replacing individual parts on it, so I’ve gone ahead and ordered a replacement system. I’m kind of tired of assembling my own systems, for once.

It’s hard to find something that perfectly suits my needs: I wanted something that was small, quiet, capable of recording TV, could have lots of storage, had DVI or HDMI video output, and a powerful enough CPU to do some video work (potentially playing HD in the future). There are a lot of options that fulfill *some* of those requirements, but not *all* of them. The Dell Studio Hybrid lacked eSATA or FireWire 800, so storage would have been slow. The HP Slimline only had 100Mbit Ethernet. The Mac Mini is getting old and a potential refresh is too far away. And so on…

I eventually settled on the Dell Vostro 220s. The base spec isn’t perfect, and it’s a bit bigger than the Studio Hybrid, but the inadequacies can be overcome via the PCI/PCIe slots. I upgraded the video card and ordered a low-profile TV tuner card, which takes care of the DVI/HDMI and TV recording. There’s two internal bays, so storage won’t be a problem, and I can add an eSATA card later on if I want fast external storage.

It could be a few weeks before the new system arrives and is set up though, so for now I ripped the main boot/home drive out of the old server and have it running it on my gaming box. It actually booted straight off of a USB enclosure and ran with no major problems (just some device names changing), other than being a little on the slow side…

Double-Whoops

Amarok crashed on me just as it was completing a collection database scan, and it popped up a crash reporter and asked me to fill in some more information about what it was doing. I dutifully filled it out, and noticed that it was going to email the crash dump. I hadn’t configured KMail yet, so I went to the Tools/Configure KMail menu…

And then KMail crashed on me. No bug report for you!

Salvage

I upgraded my Linux server box to Ubuntu 8.10 tonight, and it went smoothly enough. Well, mostly… The big, complicated things like Apache, MySQL, and MythTV actually worked perfectly after the upgrade, and instead the glitches showed up in relatively small things, like the MP3 player. The files themselves were fine, but the collection database didn’t survive the change in version of Amarok, and I lost all of the non-ID3 metadata like ratings, play counts, etc.

I was able to recover some of it, from syncing back from the iPod and the playlist I still had loaded at the time, but it looks like I’ve lost about 2/3rds of the ratings. And I have backups of the MP3 files themselves, but not of the directory where it looks like Amarok stores the metadata, though it’s not clear if that would even help if it’s a version problem. Oh well, at least it’s easier to re-rate them on the fly through the iPod…