Since I completed programming for the first version of my RenameTV project, I got a little disenchanted staring at the software side of things. Instead of treating it like a job and just getting down and packaging it all up like a good little code monkey, I decided to take a break and re-analyse my hardware.

My server isn’t the most beastly of things, at it’s heart of an Intel Core2 Q6600 and 8GB of RAM, seated in a gaming motherboard I used to have in my main PC. Running the standard distribution of Ubuntu (Maverick at the time) with a full install of MythTV (which of course meant MySQL and Apache server) all running alongside VirtualBox and as many virtual machines as I could suddenly felt like 8GB of RAM wasn’t enough elbow room.

I toyed with Debian as I knew I could make a very lean system from the ground up, but of course after having access to more up-to-date packages and even the PPAs, left Debian feeling very stuck in the past. Knowing I needed a stable system but with very minor and select access to packages under on-going development, I continued my search.

After some time I stumbled across Crunchbang Linux (also known as simply #!), an ex-Ubuntu-based distribution that had recently, with the release codenamed ‘Statler’, moved to pulling directly from Debian for it’s system base. It’s a distribution focussed on stability and speed with a minimal footprint, without being as inflexible on policy as pure Debian is. On top of the stable Debian core lies a lightweight Openbox GUI with some of the best – and most configurable – parts of other systems neatly glued together to leave with a very usable system with very little bloat indeed. For instance, it ships with the Chromium browser as it’s default, with the Thunar file manager from XFCE.

From this starting point, it was just a simple process to set up Mediatomb in place of MythTV (I was only using it for UPnP media streaming while here in Spain), and VirtualBox for my development. I also bought a 2-port gigabit PCI-E network card which allowed me to bond 2 of them together for a 2Gbps full-duplex connection to my server, still leaving the third gigabit port to be a dedicated bridge device for all the virtual machines.

With such a radical rebuild, it feels like I have a new system again! For now I’m going to be focussing on tweaking it and the networking set-up rather than getting back into the software development. Should make for an interesting few weeks…