I'm a sensible linux user now
As I alluded to over the last few weeks, mostly on Mastodon I bought a HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF recently. This is a small-ish computer meant for office positions. I don't know where this one has been from but it was shipped to me from Canada.
A G4 series is an older model, this one is from 2019 or something. It's a neat little PC. Unfortunately it came with Windows 11. Which I used for a grand total of 2 hours, to verify if the machine worked. But also to see what all the fuss was about. And I concur with many others that it's a piece of shit OS. Truly. Nothing works logically, the settings are still a mess (From Windows 7 onwards really.) And that damn Co-pilot icon is everywhere!
I frowned at it, then hit shut down.
A brief hardware inspection later showed me that the promised Wifi module was missing. That the DVD-Rom was connected but lacked a Sata cable and that it had a single stick of 8GB memory along with a 256GB Nvme-m.2-whatever-ssd.
I actually couldn't find how much Ram the computer had in Windows 11. I'm a macOS user - Sue me!
Next I set out to install Ubuntu Server 24 LTS on it. While it was installing that I ordered 3 sticks of 8GB Ram to fill all slots. I got a 6TB Nas drive from Western Digital, a Sata cable and HDD mounting screws and a USB Wifi module. The Wifi thing is temporary until I can make a more permanent setup in the house I'm buying and run some cables through the building.
It wasn't me
Of-course I screwed up the installation. Things started to go downhill during installation. I made a weirdo partition table thinking I was smart. Mounting /home on the extra HDD? Yeah, I don't know either... Oblivious to the issues that would cause me I blundered ahead, crashed the entire system within 4 hours and felt a strong urge to throw the machine out the window. It crashed through no fault of me obviously. I did everything right. I even cursed at it repeatedly.
Uh-huh yeah...
I cursed some more but alas, Linux wouldn't see reason. After many hours samba simply refused to work. I broke it so badly that even my Mac crashed three times trying to connect to it. Jellyfin wouldn't let me configure it and threw every error it could come up with at me. And Cockpit control panel worked somewhat, but apparently can't work around Ubuntu Server networking software. So that pooped its pants too. The whole system went in "I won't deal with this shit" mode and everything sort of stopped responding.
Linux is great
Seeing the errors of my ways I figured I should get a Mac Mini after all. Sell this piece of crap PC. Because obviously Linux was full of bugs. I then realized it all got infinitely harder after I tried to out-GUI the terminal with Cockpit. The thought occurred to me that I should do the partitions differently and that I should put something sensible like /data on the 6TB disk. And a few more things became obvious to me. So, instead of salvaging the Ubuntu I took a deep breath and reformatted both drives. I struggled with the terrible partioner for a bit and installed Linux like a boss!
Once SSH worked I swiftly moved away from the low-end shitty TV I was using for a monitor, I made the macOS Terminal window bigger and increased the font-size a bit. Of-course I use the only real terminal theme - Homebrew. And made those settings my default. And I was off to the races.
Samba actually worked on the first go. A few tweaks and a little experimenting later it actually worked. Jellyfin worked at the first attempt. And after I figured out the file permissions for Apache, that worked without hickups too. Transmission daemon worked on the 2nd attempt - after I thought I understood their stupid settings json file.
In my mind I did everything the same as the first time. Just in a more logical order. And I didn't try to install that damn Cockpit control panel of-course. Terminal all the way this time!
Home media server
Once the basic system was up and running I went on to tinker with a few things to make it more cool! I've made a landing page for the web server. This links to a bunch of things like Jellyfin, my Torrent Search Engine. My RSS Generator and some other stuff. And finally I've created a CGI tool that converts videos to h.264 and AAC sound.
Yes, I actually manage to cobble 328 lines of Bash together and run it from the browser with CGI through another 50 lines of CGI/HTML code. It scans for video files, and if they're not in a format I want convert them to something that works natively for the Intel UHD GPU. I'm not going to transcode video forever, just the first (and last) time.
For example; throw an old AVI video at it with MP3 sound. It'll detect that and converts it to H.264 and AAC sound. Keeping the audio channels intact. Adding subtitles if there are any, but only the english and dutch ones. It downmixes 8 channel to 6 if need be. And it limits the bitrate to a proper maximum for the common quality of the video file. Yes I used Google Gemini for some of the logic. I don't know anything about ffmpeg and hardware acceleration, Gemini does... It works, it and me worked together and while I hate AI, for stuff like this, where it adds to my limited skill - It's actually pretty useful.
Can't wait to set the server up in my new home in a few months and actually start using it!