There’s no need to think of a home server as something scary – it’s basically just a PC connected to your home network that acts like your “go-to” PC whenever you need to store stuff, backup stuff and send stuff around your network.

At the moment, there’s no real specific home server OS based on Ubuntu – Ubuntu Home Server has been started but progress seems to have slowed.

If you’re hanging out to build a home server that can stream video, digital TV, act as a central shared storage box and even automatically back up your PCs for you, there’s only a handful of applications you need to install on top of your Xubuntu or Ubuntu installation.

What are those apps? Here we go.

Streaming Digital TV

1. MythTV – yeah, everyone knows about MythTV. But did you know that MythTV not only captures digital free-to-air TV but can also stream it around your home network? MythTV comes as two parts – a back-end application that takes care of capturing and recording digital TV broadcasts from your PC’s digital TV tuner card; and a front-end application that displays those images.

In a nutshell, you set up the backend on your “home server” PC and load the front-end app on your clients – the only problem with this is you need to have Linux on your client PCs as MythTV only runs on Linux, not Windows – well, not easily anyway.

You set each client’s version of MythTV to point to the server backend’s IP address and when you launch MythTV on the client, the backend will start streaming digital TV over the network to the client. It’s a really cool feature that can enable you to watch digital TV in a room where you may not have a aerial socket.

To install MythTV, just start up a new Terminal sessions and type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mythtv

Streaming movies and music

2. VLC – Yep, I’m sure everyone knows about VLC but it has one very cool feature. Like MythTV, you can use VLC to stream video and music around your home network. It works a little differently in that you run VLC on the server and tell it to stream its data to a particular client. You run VLC on the client, tell it to pick up the stream and it plays it.

You can also stream to several PCs at the same time by simply starting up multiple instances of VLC on the server and get each instance to point to a different client. Of course, the more clients you load up on the server, the harder it and the network have to work but there are ways around that too.

If you have a slow network, try transcoding the video/audio first. VLC can do this and by transcoding it down to a lower bit rate, you sacrifice a bit of quality but you send less data across the network and that may make the difference between dropping frames and not.

The good thing with VLC is there are version for Linux and Windows so you can use it with Windows clients and simply store all of your music and movies on your “home server”.

To install VLC on Xubuntu, again, start up a Terminal session and type:

sudo apt-get install vlc

Backing up client PCs and folders

3. BackupPC – this is a great, if somewhat complicated, application that can do automated backups of client PCs. You can schedule weekly or daily backups of the whole client or just a particular folder. Even better, the whole thing can be remotely controlled via your web browser.

You can get back files stored by selecting a “download” option that gives you your selected files as an archive file sent via the network so you don’t have to front the server to get anything – it can all be done remotely.

To install backupPC on Xubuntu, again, start up a Terminal session and type:

sudo apt-get install backuppc

Remote access

4. Vino – this is a tiny little remote access server app that comes by default in Ubuntu but isn’t included in Xubuntu. By setting up Vino, you can use the Xubuntu or Ubuntu Remote Desktop application and control your “home server” remotely, as if you were sitting in front of the server with a keyboard and mouse.

Vino works well with the RealVNC Remote Desktop client tool available free for Windows and gives you full control of Xubuntu/Ubuntu.

To install vino on Xubuntu, again, start up a Terminal session and type:

sudo apt-get install vino

Windows shared folder access

5. Samba – this is the must-have app that gives Xubuntu the ability to read and write Windows folders over a network. You use this to enable Windows clients to share folders on your “home server” so that clients can use it as a central storage server. You can set up shared or private folders with password protection but as with most things, don’t rely on it for super-private documents as most private folders with password protection can be hacked one way or another.

But for sharing space on your home server so everyone can access it from any Linux or Windows PC, Samba is the must-have extension to install.

To install Samba on Xubuntu, again, start up a Terminal session and type:

sudo apt-get install samba

So there you go – five tools you can install into any Xubuntu PC and turn it into a “home server” that actually exceeds Microsoft’s Windows Home Server operating system in some areas. How do I know these work as a home server? I’ve used these five apps in developing UserOS Home Server, a Linux distro built around Xubuntu 8.04 for the October 2008 issue of Australian PC User magazine.

What’s special about UserOS Home Server is that it provides these features with a desktop OS and LiveCD that’s the same size as the original Xubuntu distro. But with some judicious slicing and dicing, we’ve been able to build UserOS Home Server into a 580MB ISO image on the cover disc, about the same size as the original Xubuntu 8.04 distro.

All you need to do is burn the ISO image to disc, install it, follow the setup instructions in the magazine and you’ll have a home server that can stream digital TV, your movies and even backup your home networked PCs.

Of course, you can load these apps onto other Linux distros as well but I chose Xubuntu because it has the feel of Ubuntu but without the bloat and it’s Xfce desktop environment is faster than Ubuntu’s GNOME. Xubuntu will also run happily on systems with only 256MB of memory, which means its better suited to older PCs you’d more likely have spare and able to press into service in this way.

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