Mandrake, Macs, Itunes and my home setup

[Buddhaboy]

I just installed Mandrakelinux (KDE) on my aging peecee last night in an effort to get a little bit more out of it since it performs so slowly on WindowsXP.

I intend to make it into a file, video, xlink kai and itunes server as well as a MythTV PVR.

Now here's my question.

Er, how do I exactly do that?

I've got two ibooks on our home wireless network with an APX base station hosting the DSL connection. An APEx connects my XBOX (Media Center) to the home network.

I'd like to be able to put my entire music library on the peecee and just access it wirelessly through either of the ibooks or the xbox.

I can probably configure the Peecee in such a way that the library would a ppear as an iTunes shared music library.

I would rather have iTunes on both our iBooks access a networked drive (hosted on the peecee) as their default music library. Would that even be possible?

My current music library is on an external Firewire HD in Mac OS Extended format. Will Linux be able to even recognize it?

Is Linux even the right way to go?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

TIA!


(Wannabe) Geek Gabe

[Edited on 3-20-2005 by Buddhaboy]

[CooLes]

Gabe, was thinking of a similar setup too but with the Xbox HD as a media center for my MP3 files. Wished there's an OSX program out there for iTunes that treats the Xbox as an external drive connected to the network that I can use to stream music from the Cube and the PowerBook. So that I could get an Airport Express for the living room to wirelessly stream the music. For now only FTP services are possible from the Xbox to the Macs.

BTW, still have my old box of Linux Mandrake 7.1 here. Haven't been able to maximize it then cause it needs an ata/66 driver for my mobo. How is Mandrake now? OT, the word Mandrake still reminds me of that old plant used to mix spells in the game Ultima IV

[Buddhaboy]

Uy, magadang setup rin yon Les.

Am sorely tempted to get another APEx for our living room rin nga eh.

Haynaku!

[Buddhaboy]

I tried, for about two days to get things up and working with Linux. Luck does not seem to be on my side though. I had to reinstall the whole package twice because Gnome and KDE would freeze up because of a write permission problem. I know I can probably fix this through the terminal (is that even the proper term for it?) but I'm just a total dummy when it comes to that which is why I had to reinstall. I'm just waiting for enough time and patience to give it another go, since I'm sure Linux would certainly be a much better and cost effective choice for aging hardware in the long run.

What I did in utter frustration was to plunk down a little money for Macdrive. I installed it on XP, connected my external firewire HD to it and then shared the external HDs through Samba. The iTunes and iPhoto libraries are now on the XP machine and I can even update my Shuffle wirelessly now (meaning the shuffle is on the iBook but the library is on a network drive).

I will brush up on Linux and complete this project someday.