I picked this little box up sort of on a whim, but I think it will fill my needs pretty well. I like the form-factor for my purposes.
I fired it up and tested it with Windows preinstalled and… yep, that’s enough of that. So, on to my use cases… I need it to primarily do two things:
A) Serve as a replacement for my traveling media box. Several times a year, I spend a week or more staying in a hotel room. I’m not crazy about streaming services and I have found hotel networks to be unreliable at best, so I like to have my media with me, just as I do at home. I had an ancient chromebox (running… some flavor - I’ve tried several) that I had upgraded the drive in. I load it up with whatever I’m watching and plug it into the hotel TV. Recently, it struggles with some of the files. I don’t know if it’s failing, or it’s simply not up to the task of running some of the higher res stuff, or what. In reality, it has earned its keep several times over, so I don’t feel bad about putting it out to pasture.
B) When at home, serve as a clone of my homelab server storage. My home server is a tank made out of recycled server parts and running OMV. It may not be the most efficient thing I could run, but it’s been ultra-reliable. I’d like to use the Beelink box to back up my important stuff and also my media library. Ideally, I could plug it in at home and have it wake up once a week or so and sync certain folders, perhaps setting it up somewhere fire-safe.
If this were your use case, how would you go about it? What would you run? I’m just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous, mostly to myself, so please don’t bury me too deeply in acronyms and jargon.
Thanks for the help.
Have you considered setting up Audiobookshelf on it? Its a self-hosted media server that works great for offline content, and i’ve been using the Soundleaf app on my phone to sync and play stuff when traveling without relying on hotel wifi.
I’ve considered setting something like that up on my main homelab system. Honestly though, I only listen to audiobooks or podcasts on one device: my phone. It has TONS of storage, so I just have it set to automatically download a large queue, The audiobooks are a drop in the bucket next to the huge music library I’ve been packing around and adding to since the iPod days.
Run something stable that will remind you to update it. I’m familiar with Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and Mint.
I advise against Ubuntu only because of the ads. I don’t want to endorse that behavior.
I advise against Arch only because you don’t want to be sorting out dependencies instead of using it for the intended purpose.
Debian and Mint both would probably be fine. Much software is written and either in the repository or has a deb.
I’m sure that others might work fine. I don’t have much experience with the snap based builds, but I guess they will be fine as well.
Mint was the first toe I dipped in the linux world (like a lot of people). I’m with you on Ubuntu, though I’ve played around with Kubuntu and liked it, though mostly I think I just like KDE Plasma.
Arch is definitely off the table for this: I want a media machine, not a job!
I definitely got a lot of mileage out of Kubuntu and Xubuntu. Xubuntu the most, trying to get more mileage out of a p4 or early dual core in 2012.
I’m trying to convince myself that I will enjoy something like Bazzite, but I’m not sure about something built off snaps.
I’d usually advocate for Mint, but for media box, I’ve been runing OpenSUSE Leap and couldn’t be happier. That’re pretty strict about media codec, tho. So you may need to enable extra repo.
Just setup a cronjpb to sync your media directory from your main machine to the new one. Should do the trick.
That was what I was leaning toward. That and just run whatever media-server distro on the beelink. Still, I figured it was worth reaching out for comments, since there are folks who do a lot more of this stuff than I do.