Sep 22, 2009
Flirting with Fedora
This has been a long time coming to say the least. With commercially run Linux web servers on the rise and continuous nudging from my OCAD colleague Ramtin Lotfabadi – Manager, Online Architecture & Development, i have started my foray into Fedora, the open source Linux operating system.
First impressions are extremely positive. Start up/run-time is super-fast. The GNOME desktop aesthetic is much like the Mac OS with a hint of Windows XP styling. Finding your way around is relatively easy as well; just a matter of getting acquainted which really takes no time atoll. The only real learning curve i could see would be the Linux file system and how that is utilized.
So anyway, i decided to buy a new computer to run the system and also act as a file-server on our home network housing all our music, pictures and other miscellaneous data. In implementation though a couple of requirements/challenges came out of this scenario:
- Both computers on the network (one Linux, one Windows) need to be able to communicate with each other in order to share files
- The Linux computer needs to be able to stream our music to any computer connected on the network
The easiest way i found for Linux to communicate to a Windows PC is through Samba via the SMB protocol. On Fedora though you will need to install and configure it first i.e., change the default preferences to connect to the correct Windows workgroup, add a Samba share and finally add a user who will be able to access and use the service. Next, you will need to open your firewall and configure that to allow Samba communication on the network. Then, if enabled, SELinux needs to be configured just like your firewall. Finally, once all that has been done and a couple restarts later, your Linux and Windows PC will be able to communicate back and forth allowing you to start transferring all your files onto the Linux computer from your Windows PC. Nice!
With all our music on the Linux computer the other requirement i needed was to be able listen to it while on my Windows PC. I tried several solutions from Tangerine to the Firefly Media Server (mt-daapd) to no avail; guess i’m too much of a novice user still?! I ended up using Fedora’s default music player: Rhythmbox for it comes pre-installed with something called Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) that simply broadcasts itself as a music share in iTunes on the Windows PC under “Shared Libraries”. The only thing left to do is make sure port 3689 TCP is open in your firewall and away you go!
Next up, gaining a greater understanding of the open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) web server environment!! The fun never ends at our place…
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