Gorilla.scw

Everyone left for holidays and such. I was left all alone in my digs. The product: Gorilla, and subsequently, PuddleTV (more on that later).

The idea has been floating around in my head for quite some time now. With all the media and random stuff on my PC, I could create some kind of continuous television programme on the TV in our communal lounge. At first, we played movies on the TV rather than sitting and watching it on a small computer screen, but it wasn't as easy as it sounds. To do this, I would have to move my whole PC through to the lounge, of course, switching it off (which any geek will tell you, is criminal) and taking the mouse and keyboard with it, plus extra AV cabling. This wasn't fun. And when you want to do it often, it becomes more of a pain than a pleasure.

The solution was simple: Using the spare parts I have lying around, create another stand-alone "dumb" terminal which can just play movies and nothing else. This was easy, first of all, I had tons of spare parts around my room from PC's that I've repaired and replaced over the last few years, and second of all, because our entire digs is on a switched network, it wouldn't need a big hard drive at all because all the media would be streamed over the network.

The end result goes by the name of Gorilla. The name was a randomly chosen word that Darb (my brother) gave the outstanding registered network address and so, the new machine, Gorilla, was named. It's a Pentium-4 2.0 Ghz, with onboard network and audio. It carries a two gigabyte hard drive as it's primary drive and a one gigabyte drive as it's auxillary. Stacked with a mere 128Mb SDRAM PC133, and an old 32Mb RIVATNT2 AGP video card, it more than fits the requirements for playing standard compressed media.

The first obstacle was the operating system. Being a keen Gentoo Linux user, my first instincts were to install a base Gentoo linux system and then tailor it with some customized version of X and standard MPlayer. Unfortunately, when seeking Darb's counsel on choice of OS, his opinions seemed to differ. He believed that a more desktop oriented flavour of Linux would suit Gorilla better, something along the lines of Ubuntu Linux. I am not a fan of Ubuntu. I have tried to use it before on our home PC in Durban, with no luck. I found that the simple desktop user requirements were not met, and simplistic things like connecting to the internet via a modem rather than a permanent DSL line, were verging on impossible. And if they're impossible for me as a long standing *NIX user, then how would the usual Joe be able to do it? Due to this, I was against the Ubuntu idea but because of it's quick installation times and relatively easy install procedure (as well as the respect I have for Darb's opinion) I decided to try it out.

I was unsuccessful. Dealing with such a small hard drive (2Gb) makes any standard Linux desktop installation difficult (but not impossible). Ubuntu states that it requires only 2gb for the normal installation, but when trying to perform this install, it ran out of disk space. This was Not Kief (tm). After a couple hours of toying with Ubuntu to make it install a less-fancy base, I threw in the towel and went with what I knew best, Gentoo.

Gentoo has it's pro's and con's. I'm a firm believer in Gentoo, and I still rate it as the best Linux distribution available. I have never liked Debian (the basis of Ubuntu) and I have always enjoyed compiling and installing applications from source (the basis of Gentoo).

After pulling out of Ubuntu's install, and burning a copy of Gentoo's install CD, I was on my way. About 6 hours later I was settled in with a neat Gentoo installation containing all the required applications and 250mb to spare. Things were looking good.

Originally I wanted to build routing and bridging capabilities into Gorilla as well, so that he could take the place of our current router, Figlet. Figlet is a fine specimen, don't get me wrong, but her temperamental nature lends itself to being referred to as a female :-)

Gorilla was ready for launch, and after hooking it up to the TV (via a Digital to PAL converter), it was looking good. I samba mounted all my music videos onto Gorilla, and set it to play in a loop continuously, randomizing video choice, using MPlayer. Suddenly, the Puddle had a new music television channel.