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[syndromeofadown]

Downstairs open area. Kitchen / living room
Paradigm Monitor 11 v7
SMSL A100 dac
SMSL AO200 amp
Beelink Mini PC, EQ12 Intel 12th Gen N305



that is audiophile twine holding everything in place





Loft
Dell Latitude 3120 11.6" HD Laptop - Intel Celeron N5100 – battery removed
Emotiva basx stereo amplifier. 10 year old model.
schiit Modi Multibit
schiit SYS
schiit Vali
Emotiva T1 speakers.







Closet. Server
is old PC shown here:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,86076.msg588639.html#msg588639
case was updated to Meshify (was free because came with dent), power supply was updated since the last one blew.



Fiber internet
GL.iNet GL-AX1800(Flint) router.



TV Room
GMKtec Mini, M7 AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H
Behringer U-Phoria UMC1820 USB Audio Interface (UMC1820d1)
[Upgraded Version]Fosi Audio TB10D 600W TPA3255 with 48V power X3
Paradigm Cinema 100 X6
sub is a square turd
5.1 with 2 center channels.



Is 8 channel dac, but only 6 channels needed, so channels remapped to have 2 center channel speakers

DAC is balanced so TS 1/4 inch plug was used to convert to single ended / unbalanced. (balanced would use TRS)


This is a new house. Ethernet runs throughout. Electrician and contractor were quite confused with this concept, with wifi and bluetooth being a thing. All PC’s are running linux. No microsoft in the house. I was planning Fedora KDE since that’s what I use daily, but instead went with Kubuntu 24 LTS. Reason being the forum here shows how to add repo. It is easy. Fedora updates too frequently, and largly.

Each PC has JRiver and spotify, nothing else. There is a tablet with JRiver and spotify, nothing else. Spotify is the family’s thing not mine, I would prefer not to have it. I went with spotify over tidal because tidal cannot be controlled with tablet, where Spotify can.

Instead of bringing over almost 20 years of MC customizations from my windows PC, I did a fresh library with simple views for movies, TV shows, and audio. I setup everything on the server and all other PCs load this library on startup. “Library Server” I believe it is called.

Each PC has a wireless mouse and keyboard. All navigation is done in standard view. This is what I like, and this is what the family likes. I do plan on setting up theatre view, but that sounds like a project for next winter. I would also like to try out using a flirc remote I have. Again, next winter. I initially did this whole setup with windows, then when it was working perfectly i started fresh with Linux. I had JRemote and MO 4Media working with windows, but still have to set it up with the fresh library. This should happen soon as this is how the stereo in the loft is controlled.

Issues I had with the whole setup:

Time. Everything takes time.

Everything these days is ordered online so any small missing part is 1 week to 2 months to arrive.

Mounting stuff behind the TV is an ordeal. The mini PC was over heating, so I added a fan just for a little more airflow, which was loud. I replaced it with an 8 cm Noctua. It is silent.

One of the TVs did not recognize the PC properly with Linux. Firmware needed updated. This was an evening of google accounts to make samsung accounts to be verified with phone numbers. Terms and conditions that can be altered at anytime. Hours later, with an ad filled interface, the TV recognized the PC properly. A hard reset of the TV wiped all the junk, and kept the firmware. And reminded me of why we are switching to Linux.

DAC power supply blew on first use. Luckily I had a universal 12v adapter.

Issues I had Linux specific:

I did not know how to mount drives. Now that I have done it a few times it is dead simple, but that first one was a doosy
Linux help videos are a bit sh#t. A 40 minute video using terminal for something that takes 3 minutes using a GUI can be frustrating.

Linux forum posts (not JRiver, but general linux) shown in internet search results are 20 years old.

I did not know how to share drives over network, but now i am not sure if i care or need this.

DVD’s and some blurays. I have a massive DVD collection ripped pre 2012. I did these to folder, video_ts style. Some concert blurays are also ripped to folder. MC on Linux playing over a network does not like these. I excluded all these from my library and have spent a considerable amount of time upgrading and converting many of these. I will not be doing all, as time does not permit. Windows can play dvd with menus over a network.

In MC when choosing a surround DAC device there are about 40 options to choose from. Only one works. The one DAC i had made crazy noises when I chose the wrong one. I tossed it and got a new one. The new one has silence if the wrong option is picked. “Plughw:....[ALSA]... Harware device with all software conversions” works.

I started with mini PCs with N5105 and they played anything on windows, barely. On Linux they cannot play some 4K content. It will be choppy and / or audio out of sync. Is it hardware acceleration? I had to upgrade these to the above noted GMKTek and Beelink N305. The N305 still struggles but it works.

The server will not start without a monitor plugged in. I got a dummy HDMI plug for it.

Kubuntu does not like screen savers. It likes to go to lock screen, which acts like a screen saver, but then you have to log in.


Benifits of the setup.
The computers turn on, no sign in, MC opens automatically and loads the server library. Then it just sits there doing nothing unless I tell it to do something. When asked, it responds quickly. Video looks great, audio sounds great. Everything is simple to use. No one in the family has any issues. Since getting everything setup there has been zero issues.
No automatic updates, no spyware, no AI, no adds, no DRM, no accounts, no corporations or government agencies acting like drug addicts jonesing for my data.

In the future:
Setup JRemote

Try theater view

Try Flirc remote

may add firewall and pihole (or similar) to network

switch from access keys to static IPs.

upgrade server to something more power efficient. I am thinking about Odroid H4 Plus.

I have a Raspberry pi monitor that I will at to the server. It will mount on the wall.

But no more for now. I am having a break.

It was worth the time and effort to move away from Windows. I have been trying to do this for years, and now that I have some experience everything is quite simple to use.

[BryanC]

Videos are a waste of time for learning the terminal. Just ask ChatGPT or Copilot for help.

[mwillems]

I 100% agree that videos aren't worth bothering with.  I've had very mixed luck with ChatGPT for Linux system administration topics for what it's worth.  Maybe I'm dealing with more exotic issues than the usual or something, but more than half of the solutions suggested by LLMs have been bogus (or may have once been correct back in the SysVInit days, but...) 

For learning about the terminal generally, I can highly recommend this book which is free (both as in beer and as in freedom):  http://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php

It's an excellent orderly introduction to terminal/command-line concepts with a little bit of system administration stuff thrown in.

For topics like network sharing, the Arch wiki also has excellent articles that frequently apply equally to any Linux system. 

FWIW I'm also running in an almost 100% Linux environment for many years and have been quite happy with it.  My wife still likes Windows, so hers is the last remaining Windows PC in the house.  I've found it's nice to have one Windows PC around just in case you need to do some random firmware upgrade for a device that doesn't support Linux, but otherwise I haven't missed Windows even a little bit (especially since Linux gaming is now basically solved).

[syndromeofadown]

In the whole house that I setup, which has even more computers on desks plus laptops, I only had to use terminal twice (on each PC). Everything was done through GUI.
1 Install MC, which is very easy. Just some copy and paste.
2 Install Spotify. Again just a copy and paste, but needed to install curl too.

I even stopped using terminal for apt-get update / upgrade. In fresh installs some computers would not boot after the big updates. Doing it through the GUI did it in chunks with no issue.

My drives were formatted and mounted with KDE partition manager, but I basically just found this on my own and figured it out. I never came across any simple explanations of mount points, permissions, drive labels, partition names, UUID. There was just terminal and commands.

Basically in all of my research there was no explanation of WHY for anything, just a bunch of commands.

I still have to look into disk encryption, probably with LUKS, and firewall. I still cannot find an explanation if I need a software firewall. Just comments like "You can never be too safe".
Security on Linux is very confusing. Not so much how to implement it, more on what you actually need.

I use a computer all day at work so it is very tedious to figure these things out in my free time. I am on computers too much. But I am very happy with everything I have accomplished. I have wanted to go full Linux since the first release of MC on Linux. Version 20 I believe. I have been getting Master licenses since then just to support it, but not really using too much. Before this project I was just using MC for fairly basic things on Linux.

[dlparker]

I'm just now reading this thread, but it's now over a week old and no one - absolutely NO ONE - has asked the most important question:

Has the audiophile twine been cryo-treated?