Powerful and straightforward software installations

That being said, you want a media server but you are not comfortable with these technologies, which might scare you or put you off. The applications used in this book are really straightforward to install and use; particularly, open source applications have been selected.

Using dedicated hardware

Additionally, we are going to use an embedded board instead of the heavy, large, and power-consuming PCs so that we can also drastically reduce the costs. While we will focus on BeagleBone Black in this book, the chapters have been written to use most of the boards available on the market, such as Raspberry Pi, WandBoard, CubieBoard, and some others, as long as the board supports Linux and has a network connection.

The main goal of this approach is that you learn to be independent enough so that the next time you receive a promotional e-mail with music streaming advertising, you'll throw it away, smiling proudly.

This chapter is about installing a MediaDrop server, which will be introduced shortly. As promised, it will be quite easy (really easy, in fact); no compilation or library will be invoked. Before the installation process itself, we will have a quick look at some situations that an embedded board is able to resolve. We will also find out why we should consider a server philosophy instead of a traditional computer. This will impact the remaining part of the book because the board will be accessed through an SSH connection; we will also have to take into consideration our available free space to store our applications and media contents. Then, we will start the installation part for the MediaDrop server itself. Management and security tasks have been split in additional chapters, so you can skip them and get back later if you want.

Welcome to the first step of your independence.

In this chapter, we will talk about the following topics: