Up till now I have run Slimserver from my main desktop Windows PC. While it has run OK, I have always been a bit uncomfortable with having to have the PC running and consuming anything up to 190W of electricity just to play some music. I thought about a NAS solution, but wasn't happy with the current NAS solutions. Instead, I decided to build a mini-ITX based system. These have the advantage of low power consumption (around 25W flat out), plus the board I chose (a Jetway J7F2) has no onboard fan, so it would also be quiet.
Initially I was going to stick Windows on the new machine, but in the end decided to go for Ubuntu, a flavour of Linux. I was a bit apprehensive, as I had no prior experience of using Linux (or building my own PC for that matter), but it all went rather well.
Initial impressions are that the interface on the Squeezebox is a lot snappier than when run from my higher spec Windows machine. But I will spend some time trying more things out before I come to any firm conclusions.
There were one or two Linux related pitfalls along the way, which I will document later, but it was a good learning expereince, which now has me tempted to run Ubuntu on my main machine...
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