Installing SqueezeboxServer on Sheevaplug by a Linux newbie: success

[kesey]

I'm about to embark on the voyage (hopefully short and sweet) to getting Squeezeboxserver 7.4.2 working on the Sheevaplug. This will be connected by ethernet cable to a router which delivers wired and wireless networking to my home. I've bought, after speaking with New It, the Multi-Boot Sheeva - Debian Squeeze 4Gb SD with an Additional SD card - Integral Ultima 4G class 6 with Debian Squeeze. I'll keep a list of Sheevaplug, SqueezeboxServer and other resources on this post, which I will update as I find my way around, for easy access.

I've been using the Squeezebox Classic for a number of years now. I also have a Duet and a Boom. I store my music on a desktop internal hard drive, but also keep copies on a number of USB-powered external drives. I've used mostly Windows variants (all flavours from 3.1 up to Windows 7 Pro 64 bit) up until now. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and 9.04 on an old desktop and got Slimserver and later Squeezeserver running on that. The desktop was too blooming noisy so I did not do too much work on it, but I took the opportunity to play with Ubuntu a bit. I'm very much a Linux newbie as of December 2009 and have installed Ubuntu 9.04 on a laptop to dual boot with XP Pro SP3.

I would note that as a newbie, I've found it impossible to get Squeezeboxserver (7.4.1. or 7.4.2) on Ubuntu 9.10 to talk to my USB hard-drive, so I've reverted to Ubuntu 9.04 on which I've installed Squeezeboxserver 7.4.2. Ubuntu 9.04 shows my USB hard drive in /media/

Firstly, I want to thank New It for the marvellous service on delivery. I ordered on Friday afternoon Dec 18th, and the Sheevaplug was delivered to my home in Ireland on Tuesday Dec 22nd. That kind of service is as good as it gets.

Regarding SqueezeboxServer, I use 7.4.2 and update regularly to the new nightly. These are obtainable here:
http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/7.4/
You can get 7.5 (the "unstable" i.e. development version) here: http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/7.5/
7.4.2 is nominally the "testing" version, but is in fact very stable in both Windows and .deb flavours.

Installation:

1: Set up the serial USB connection as per http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/How-to_setup_PuTTY_for_the_SheevaPlug_on_Windows

As I was using a desktop with Windows 7, this entailed, for me, installing the WindowsTeraTermUSBDriver from the SheevaPlug Development Kit CD (for USB Port A, USB Port B and USP Port .i.e. 3 times). PuTTY then worked fine.

2: Connect your ethernet cable from your router to your Sheevaplug.

3: Open PuTTY. Log into Debian using the Username and Password in your documentation

4: Apt-get update

I tried apt-get install on the latest nightly 7.4.2 and it did not work for me, so next step was to try wget instead:

5: wget http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/7.4/sc/29673/squeezeboxserver_7.4.2~29673_all.deb

dpkg -i squeezeboxserver_7.4.2~29673_all.deb
apt-get -f install

6: Use the web browser, on the computer you are running PuTTY from, to go to ShevaPlug_ip_address:9000 (for me 192.168.15.102:9000)

7: You should now be in the Squeezebox Server web-page.

USB HARD-drive

Note: I tried this with an NTFS drive on SheevaPlug Debian, and it said " mount: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs' "

courtesy of: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/mandriva-30/mount-an-external-ntfs-usb-hard-disk-201441/

"Plug the USB Hard-drive in and then open a terminal and enter the command dmesg . Look for something like:

usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using address 2
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: IC25N020  Model: ATCS04-0          Rev: CA2O
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
SCSI device sda: 39070080 512-byte hdwr sectors (20004 MB)
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 sda: sda1
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
The details will be different but the important bit is the line
sda: sda1
Dmesg has seen an sda disk and it is calling it sda1. So if I open a terminal and become root I can
mount /dev/sda1 /some/empty/folder". In my case, this was /media/


I formatted a Lacie 250Gig drive to Fat 32, copied a few files to it...:

THE RESULTS:
Version: 7.4.2 - r29673 @ Wed Dec 23 04:01:49 PST 2009
Hostname: debian
Server IP Address: 192.168.15.102
Server HTTP Port Number: 9000
Operating system: Debian - EN - utf8
Platform Architecture: armv5tel-linux
Perl Version: 5.10.1 - arm-linux-gnueabi-thread-multi
MySQL Version: 5.1.41-3
Total Players Recognized: 0
 
Library Statistics
Total Tracks: 9,368
Total Albums: 716
Total Artists: 717
Total Genres: 70
Total Playing Time: 688:58:55
 
Music Scan Details
Directory Scan   (9368  of  9368)   Complete  00:28:39
 
Playlist Scan   (350  of  350)   Complete  00:05:32
 
Merge Various Artists   (693  of  693)   Complete  00:01:23
 
Artwork Scan   (716  of  716)   Complete  00:21:30
 
The server has finished scanning your music collection.
Total Time: 00:57:04 (Thursday, December 24, 2009 / 3:51 AM)

Not bad at all, 57 mins total scanning time will work!
 
 



Resources:

New It:
Forums: http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,188.0.html (post by NewIt_Marcus 5th on the page)

Slim Devices/Logitech:
Downloads: http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/7.4/
                http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/7.5/
Forums:     http://forums.slimdevices.com/
Wiki:         http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Main_Page
               http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/SheevaPlug_Installation_guide

[kesey]

After a couple of days using FAT 32, I tried to see if I could get the Sheevaplug (Debian Squeeze on a 4 Gig SD card)  to run Squeezeboxserver using a USB hard-drive formatted with NTFS.

I installed Cygwin on my Windows 7 desktop, and used this to SSH into my Sheevaplug:


NTFS
1: ssh root@192.168.15.102
    Enter your Sheevaplug password.
2: Sudo mkdir /media/windows
3  apt-get update
4: apt-get install ntfs-3g
5: ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/windows

To confirm that all worked:
cd /media/windows
ls

Bob's your uncle.

ext3
I have an old laptop with an 80 gig hard-drive lying about, so I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on it to see whether I could manage file transfers to the USB drive connected to the Sheevaplug easily, if I were to format it in ext3. I was googling about and came across this excellent guide to getting Samba going:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89hjWOb8qmY&annotation_id=annotation_888326&feature=iv

As far as I'm concerned at this stage of my linux education (i.e. knowing enough to know that I know nothing) the above video is the dog's danglies. In no time at all, I had established shares and a couple of minutes later I was able to Samba in from my Windows 7 Pro 64 bit desktop.

I shrunk the NTFS partition on the 500 gig USB drive to 220 gigs (leaving a copy of my music on this), and formatted the rest to ext3. I next attached the USB drive to my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop. The 2 partitions, NTFS and ext3 mounted nicely.  I went about copying the whole shebang of directories and files to ext3 by drag and drop etc.

Ubuntu told me to take a hike - I did not have permission to piddle about on its living-room floor. Back to Google.

Open a terminal on the desktop in 9.04.
gksudo nautilus
Two lovely File Browser windows opened up, one from the NTFS partition and the other from the ext3 partition. I made a Music directory on the ext3 partition by sudo mkdir /media/Lacie_ext3/ext3_Music

A quick drag and drop from the NTFS window into this directory and 4 1/2 hours later 220 gigs of music had found a summer home in ext3. I did mention it was an old laptop!

I did a "Clear everything and rescan" in Squeezeboxserver, having given it the new address to scan. 10 mins later the 9300 songs were scanned in and ready to play. A nice clean scan with no mcafee or how's your father getting in the way.

Sheevaplug ( Debian Squeeze on 4 gig SD card) with USB hard-drive formatted in ext3 and NTFS:

Note: for those who might like to try ext4 formatting on their hard-disks: as of now, afaik, Debian Squeeze does not yet recognise ext4.

I was mounting a USB hard drive with an NTFS partition and an ext3 partition. Dmesg on the Sheevaplug found both partitions, naming them sda1 and sda2. As the ext3 was the second partition on the drive, I tried to mount this as sda2, which turned out to be correct:

mount /dev/sda2/ /media/

The Squeezeboxserver scan:

Version: 7.4.2 - r29673 @ Wed Dec 23 04:01:49 PST 2009
Hostname: debian
IP: 192.168.15.111
HTTP Port: 9000
OS: Debian - EN - utf8
Platform: armv5tel-linux
Perl Version: 5.10.1 - arm-linux-gnueabi-thread-multi
MySQL Version: 5.1.41-3
Total Players Recognized: 2
 
Library Statistics
Total Tracks: 9,373
Total Albums: 718
Total Artists: 717
Total Genres: 70
Total Playing Time: 689:13:43

Directory Scan   (9373  of  9373)   Complete  00:27:07
 
Playlist Scan    Complete  00:00:00
 
Merge Various Artists   (695  of  695)   Complete  00:01:23
 
Artwork Scan   (718  of  718)   Complete  00:21:21
 
The server has finished scanning your music collection.
Total Time: 00:49:51 (Wednesday, December 30, 2009 / 1:01 AM)

The ext3 scan took 49:51 mins in total whereas the FAT32 scan shown in post #1 above took 57:04 mins.