I just realized that it’s been a little over a year since I pretty much permanently switched from Windows to Linux! I had been using Linux on and off over the past 10 years or so, but it wasn’t until a year ago that I seriously ditched Windows in favor of Linux. On December 30, 2004 I blogged about my Gentoo installation, which I had completed the week before. I kept Windows as a dual boot option, but these days I pretty much never boot Windows any more....
I just added another external hard drive to my Linux system, and now I’m wondering about a few potential issues. At this point I have one permanently attached external hard drive, one backup hard drive that I only hook up occasionally, my iPod (which I mostly use on my Windows laptop because I don’t want to miss out on iTunes, but which I want to be able to occasionally hook up to my Linux box to transfer files, etc....
A good week ago, I decided to install Kubuntu Linux at home, replacing my previous Gentoo Linux installation. Overall I was very happy with Gentoo, and it still ranks high among my favorite Linux distributions. But while it was cool to have a system that was built from source and therefore (at least in theory) optimized for my particular needs as well as very up to date, I seemed to be spending a disproportionate amount of time doing upgrades....
I just set my Linux box up as an iTunes server. After seeing how easy it was to get this working (not least because of Gentoo’s excellent package management), I’m almost annoyed at myself for putting this off for so long. :) The HOWTO Apple ITunes Server document on the Gentoo Wiki was absolutely on the spot and made this very easy, and the entire installation only consisted of a handful of comments plus some very simple config file changes....
I haven’t tried it yet, but it is possible to set up Linux as an iTunes server, allowing any Windows or Apple machines on the network running iTunes to browse and play any music on that server. This sounds ideal for me, as my music collection lives on my desktop PC that usually runs Linux, while my wife and I often use our wireless laptops. This should even allow us to easily sync music to out iPods, albeit over the relatively slow 54Mbps wireless connection (which is why I usually just hook up my iPod to my desktop for this purpose)....