Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Using dedicated hardware
Additionally, we are going to use an embedded board instead of the heavy, large,
and power-consuming PCs so that we can also drastically reduce the costs. While
we will focus on
BeagleBone Black
in this topic, the chapters have been written to
use most of the boards available on the market, such as Raspberry Pi, WandBoard,
CubieBoard, and some others, as long as the board supports Linux and has a
network connection.
The main goal of this approach is that you learn to be independent enough so that
the next time you receive a promotional e-mail with music streaming advertising,
you'll throw it away, smiling proudly.
This chapter is about installing a MediaDrop server, which will be introduced shortly.
As promised, it will be quite easy (really easy, in fact); no compilation or library will
be invoked. Before the installation process itself, we will have a quick look at some
situations that an embedded board is able to resolve. We will also find out why we
should consider a server philosophy instead of a traditional computer. This will
impact the remaining part of the topic because the board will be accessed through an
SSH connection; we will also have to take into consideration our available free space
to store our applications and media contents. Then, we will start the installation part
for the MediaDrop server itself. Management and security tasks have been split in
additional chapters, so you can skip them and get back later if you want.
Welcome to the first step of your independence.
In this chapter, we will talk about the following topics:
• Looking at daily scenarios for media usage
• Down to the cave is a server without a head—headless servers
• Preparing BeagleBone to be a server
• Let's get acquainted with our friend - MediaDrop
• MediaDrop installation steps
• Testing time - "Hello Server"
• Switching from development to production
• Let's take a walk in our new MediaDrop server
