heres a good one

Ask questions regarding Gentoox, Gentoo and Linux in general in these forums and we'll do our best to help you!
Post Reply
leperkuan
Linux User
Posts: 11
Joined: Sun Apr 27, 2008 7:49 am

heres a good one

Post by leperkuan »

Soo i'm looking for a tool that would be a cross between VNC and Putty (ssh) as to where i could startx from my computer on the xbox and it would pop up like VNC. I Figure starting X from putty would lead me no where or maybe i am wrong? does anyone use this type of function. my xbox sits kind of hidden and its dont want to hook up my keyboard and mouse everytime i need to edit some settings of some sort. I guess another question i have is what servers do people use as in Lampp style. I am using Xampp Linux and im almost certain it is eating away my memory. Although after going from a loopback install to a Native i do see some very good results speed wise the phpsysinfo always shows 1mb of physical memory free? should i lean towards a lighter http server, maybe just kill the always running ftp server? I want to toy with it but it is kind of live right now so i would love to see some suggestions before i close down the server. :D
xbox 1.5 duox2 40gb HD
clpalmer
Power user
Posts: 288
Joined: Sat Jan 29, 2005 6:38 pm

Re: heres a good one

Post by clpalmer »

I used to run my XBox as a server and didn't even have xfce on it at all. It ran bind, apache, glftpd, sshd, samba, postfix, dhcpd, mysqld, and probably a few other services I can't remember and still had no problems downloading from newsgroups with nzbget and some torrents with rtorrent.

It's got 128MB, but I'm not sure how much of a difference that made. You'd notice the lack of performance when you tried to download and decode newsgroups at >500kB/s, though.

I ended up replacing the XBox with another server cuz my cable modem can download from giganews at ~1.4MB/s and the XBox could only handle ~500kB/s without lagging behind in decoding. Also wanted to put a TV capture card in it. Now the two XBox's run XBMC as frontends in the living room and bedroom.

Anyways, there was no need for me to have any gui bloating things and sucking resources when I didn't ever use it anyways. Don't think there's much of anything that requires it.

If you really want the functionality, what you can probably do is look at putting something like XWin32 on the PC you're connecting from (assuming it's a windows machine). Think you still need to run an XServer on the XBox, but at least you wouldn't need the desktop manager or other UI stuff that's really heavy. Then when you want to run a graphical tool, just ssh into your server and run the tool and the window will pop up on your PC instead of on the server. As long as you're on a decently fast connection, it's quite usable.
leperkuan
Linux User
Posts: 11
Joined: Sun Apr 27, 2008 7:49 am

Re: heres a good one

Post by leperkuan »

Well it is a local connection so im sure speed is no problem. i dont want to run a gui constant i just want to be able to log on to one when i need it like right now i need to edit php.ini and im to dumb to do it from bash plus i realize in the future i will need it for some things but i will certainly exit it when im done using it :) im running a torrent site which is small maybe 200 users and it seems to run nicely on the xbox, i had it on my windows pc but i got tired of leaving it on every night as the xbox might be more efficent also. of course i plan on upgrading ive been looking at the DreamX but they are pricey for what they are so im looking into a slimline HP or dell case. you know something i can throw in the corner and forget about while the uptime is 400days
xbox 1.5 duox2 40gb HD
clpalmer
Power user
Posts: 288
Joined: Sat Jan 29, 2005 6:38 pm

Re: heres a good one

Post by clpalmer »

I ended up making my own PC. Was <$300 and has a low-profile desktop case. Case size is only 3.6" x 12.2" x 15.7"

$69 - Athlon64 X2 5000+ 2.6GHz AM2 1000FSB (65W)
$60 - Asus M2N-MX SE Plus AM2+ DDR2 mATX A/V/L
$36 - Kingston 2GB DDR2-800
$60 - In-Win BT610 Slim Tower/Desktop 300W
$55 - Western Digital Caviar 320GB SATA-II
$280 - Total

That's from a local computer store and in CDN dollars, but if you're in a larger city you can probably find something similar. I looked at the shuttle as a slightly smaller alternative, but they're several hundred dollars more, even used.

XBox is definitely the cheapest. I've seen em around here for $100, modded with 128MB upgrade. Cheap price comes with the performance hit, though. I was amazed to see how much faster things went when I upgraded the server =)

Plus, as a side benefit, the XBox makes a great front-end for the living room if you put XBMC on it (not to turn away from gentoox, or anything =) With the mythTV plugin for XBMC, I can watch all the TV shows the server records and play whatever music, videos, etc, I download.
Post Reply