Howdy!

After Urho Konttori released USBControl and made it possible to connect USB-hard drive to N800 I thought I would love to have squeezecenter mediastreamer software installed in my extra N800 (or N770). Have anyone tried this so far? Maybe some other streamer software?

N800 would be low energy consuming and light server, and could also work as http and ftp server.

I don't have any Linux experience so far, so this would be too difficult to me to test. On the other hand, I don't any Linux computer to compile the squeezecenter source to N800.

Squeezecenter is great in many ways, but two things it can't be described as are "low energy consuming" and "light". The players themselves are quite dumb devices and everything you see on the screen is computed on the server side and sent over the network to the player. Even the audio is transcoded on the server side in many cases. It would probably drain the battery too quickly to be useful.

Also, "porting" it to maemo would not be a trivial exercise. It relies on a large number of Perl modules and MySQL, all of which have a significant footprint. Even if you manage to do it, the memory footprint would be prohibitive - on my server here it uses 63M resident memory for the main squeezecenter process plus another 24M for mysqld, which is definitely too much for a 770 and probably would swap a lot on a N8x0.

On the other hand, tablets work very well as a players and/or controllers - there's even a theme ("Nokia770") optimised specifically for the tablet screens.

It is possible to run squeezecenter and slimserver (previous version) on some linux NAS devices including the linksys NLSU, so the question is not that daft.

altenatively if you want stream music to the N800, squeezecenter/slimserver offers a stream which works as an internet radio stream in either media player or Canola2. Only issue is that it lags about 25 seconds behind any change you make on the web console.

Personally though I'd run squeezecenter on a dedicated PC or NAS-device, and use the N800 for what it is best at, and that is as a wireless control interface. I have slimserver on my Mythtv server, and squeezeslave setup as a headless player which I can start and stop as a service.
I use the Nokia770 skin on the slimserver web interface which is absolutely brilliant, and works really well on a laptop too.

I have 2 tablets, an N800, and a 770. We had a house party last week, and the 770 was getting passed around the guests to control the music, while I could also control using my N800(cos no-one else gets their sticky hands on MY N800!)

everyone was amazed at the system and thought that it was sub-zero (really really cool!)

Gaz

Hi!

Now i have my desktop computer running on win2000 as a media server with TVersity as UPnP server (used rarely) and SqueezeCenter as .mp3 streamer. I have one 770 at home as a player (unfortunately my Noxxon media streamer have difficulties to stay connected to my Dlink wlan box...), 800 is serving as a remote controller . With N95 with internet radio player I can listen my music everywhere I want because SqueeceCenter .mp3 stream acts as a internet radio as gazza mentioned.

However, today when energy sawing is IN, I want to get rid of that overpowered desktop computer and run SqueezeCenter in lighter and low consuming device. Since i have an extra N800 I thought that could be the choice for me. I have been also looking for old laptops to do the job, but no luck in flea markets... NAS devices (Buffalo, Synology etc) are also known to do the job, but why to spend extra money if you have suitable hardware allready available?

Gazza: last spring I had a house party too. Different music in 4 rooms, each having N770/N800/N810/laptop with a video projector as players, and one DJ/VJ controlling each of them from the server! What a MULTImedia hang over after that night... ;-)

Indeed, however these boxes don't typically also run a full desktop environment at the same time, and they don't run on batteries so constantly waking up to refresh a player's display or transcode and transmit the next chunk of audio data isn't a big deal.

It should be feasible to use the N800 as a dedicated (ie, always connected to power, and not running much else) squeezeserver. Your best bet would be to start by installing a different distribution on it (Debian or maybe Mamona), preferably running in console mode (without X11) to maximise the available RAM.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself.