Site Devices

As Hamza Malik says, technology is evolving at a rapid pace. With new products, or better versions of older products being released every year, older products are rendered useless. Every household has an assortment of ‘outdated’ technology. Technology left unused for years, covered with layers of dust.

But often the usefulness of these ‘outdated’ products is only limited by our creativity and willingness to experiment.

I recently noticed an old Sony stereo system, and an old Dell Pentium III desktop lying around the house. At first I though about disposing of these, but then I thought better. I ended up with a setup that allows me to remotely play music on the stereo system using any device with wi-fi and a browser, whether it be a desktop, laptop, Palm Pilot, HP iPAQ, or a cell phone.

How it basically works:

The Dell computer, which is connected to the stereo system, acts as a server on the LAN. Other devices on the LAN can either stream songs to the server, or remotely access the server and launch locally stored songs on it.

The following explains how I accomplished this setup. It assumes that you already know how to setup a wireless router.

The following hardware was used:

• - Sony Stereo System
• - Old Dell CPU (500 MHZ Pentium III, 128 MB Ram, 6 GB Hard Drive)
• - A Y cable (male stereo 1/8-inch plug to two male RCA plugs)
• - An Ethernet cable
• - Speedtouch wireless router
• - Monitor
• - Keyboard
• - Mouse

Note: The monitor and mouse is only required when the computer is being set up. Once the software has been installed and correctly configured, the computer only needs a keyboard attached to it to boot up. If a laptop is being used as the server instead, the extra hardware is not needed. Read the rest of this entry »

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The final class of network devices is the dial-up device. Most typically, this is a conventional telephone modem used in conjunction with the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) to establish a connection to the Internet via an ISP. Such connections are established via command-line or GUI tools, as described in Chapter 2. In addition to these tools, though, the Linux kernel requires support for the dial-up connection.

To activate this support, you must select the PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) Support option in the Network Device Support menu. When you select this option, several suboptions will become available, such as PPP Support for Async Serial Ports and PPP Deflate Compression. These options aren’t usually strictly necessary, but sometimes they can improve a connection, such as by automatically compressing highly compressible data like text for higher net throughput. The experimental PPP over Ethernet option is required if you intend to use the kernel’s PPPoE features for some DSL connections, but this option is not required with some add-on PPPoE packages, like Roaring Penguin. Read the rest of this entry »

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