How-to: Setting up a Plex Environment


DNP Howto Setting up a Plex Environment

Since the storage sizes on smartphones haven't quite caught up with that Drobo NAS in your home office, packing all of your media onto a 32GB iPhone is an impossible task. Worry not; we're going to show you how to set up a streaming environment so you can have all your jams at your fingertips on the go. The good news is there are tons of solutions out there to choose from: XBMC, MythTV and Windows Media Center just to name a few. We decided on Plex Media Server due to the broad range of devices and services it supports. On top of that, Plex allows you to share your server with friends and access your media from anywhere via the myPLEX platform. Catch us after the break to learn how to get started.

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How-to: Picking a desktop environment in Linux

DNP  Howto Picking a Desktop Environment in Linux

We've taken you through a tour of Window Managers in Linux, and now it's time to show you the Window Manager's bigger brother: the desktop environment, or DE for short. With a sea of choices out there, we can see where Linux newbies might feel a bit overwhelmed. Catch us after the break and we'll show you some of our favorites, along with a few honorable mentions.

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How-to: Picking a Window Manager in Linux

Picking a Window Manager

When using Linux, or just about any open source operating system out there for that matter, there's a proverbial Santa's knapsack of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) available. When you boil this topic down on the basic level, you've got two choices: Use a fully featured Desktop Environment (DE) with tons of bells and whistles, or alternatively you can use a slimmed-down and streamlined Window Manager (WM). We're going to get you up to speed on what each of these actually are, some reasons why you'd want to choose a WM over a DE, as well as some of the options you have among the Window Managers out there. Catch us after the break to join the age-old battle of choosing your GUI.

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How-to: Picking a Window Manager in Linux originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to set up your Raspberry Pi to play Atari 2600 games

How to set up your Raspberry Pi to play Atari 2600 games

So after your brain hurts a bit and you're tired of learning computer science on the Raspberry Pi, you might want to relax with a bit of nostalgia and exercise your thumbs with some retro gaming. Want to revisit your childhood memories of Pong? Ping away. Maybe your kids have been hounding you for a video game console but you don't have the $300 to spring for a PS3. The Pi can help you with this and help teach your kids something, to boot. After some slight software configurations and a hardware purchase or two, you can relive the days of the almighty Atari 2600. Catch us after the break and we'll show you how to get your Pi to play all your totally legal cartridge backups.

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How to set up your Raspberry Pi to play Atari 2600 games originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So you got a Raspberry Pi: now what?

When the Raspberry Pi was released earlier this year, the credit-card-sized Linux machine became an instant hit. The night it became available to order, both Premier Farnell/element14 and RS Components, the official distributors of the Pi project, exhibited the signs of a late '90s Slashdot effect: you could barely even get the two sites to load. Fast forward to today, and you can finally get your hands on one within three weeks. The Raspberry Pi is truly the Linux device of the year, if not the past decade. Follow past the break and we'll show you how to set yours up now that you've actually succeeded in snagging one.

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So you got a Raspberry Pi: now what? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Sep 2012 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A guide to Slackware and Arch Linux: getting your hands dirty with Linux

A guide to Slackware and Arch Linux getting your hands dirty with Linux

Back in 1991, a computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced on a newsgroup that he was creating a "hobby OS." That hobby was Linux, and today it's much more than a tinkerer's operating system, with availability on all manner of hardware and a seemingly unlimited array of flavors, or "distributions." Maybe you're new to Linux, or maybe you're itching to graduate from Ubuntu to something with a little more geek cred. Whatever the case, we're going to take the sting out of all those command prompts, using two great distros as examples.

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A guide to Slackware and Arch Linux: getting your hands dirty with Linux originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Aug 2012 16:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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VIM 101: a quick-and-dirty guide to our favorite free file editor

In the world of text editors, there's a plethora of options out there. If you've ever Googled "how to edit HTML sites" or some such, you know what we mean. Allow us, then, to introduce you to VIM, a free website editor that offers many of the same features as Adobe Dreamweaver, and runs on just about every desktop platform. Specifically, it comes by default on the vast majority of Linux distributions, OS X and commercial Unix systems. (It's available to install on Windows, too.) And did we mention it's free? That command line UI isn't necessarily self-explanatory, though, so join us after the break for a quick crash course to help you get started.

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VIM 101: a quick-and-dirty guide to our favorite free file editor originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How-To: XBMC 11 the XBMCbuntu way

For all intents and purposes, the original Xbox, with its NVIDIA GPU, 8-10GB hard disk and custom Pentium III processor was a high-end PC for its time -- albeit, one that connected to a television. What Microsoft didn't realize back then, though, was that when you put that kind of hardware in the hands of hackers and enthusiasts, it's only a matter of time before people start doing more than just playing Halo. Fast forward to 2003, the year the Xbox Media Center was born. Nowadays, it's simply referred to as XBMC, since it runs on more than just your Xbox. In brief, XBMC is an open-source software solution that enables a plethora of media streaming capabilities on all sorts of devices. What once was limited to the original Xbox, can now be put to use on everything from a bare-bones Linux desktop to an Apple TV. In this how-to, we'll show you how to build a simple XBMC setup using XBMCbuntu. Catch us after the break for the full step-by-step.

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How-To: XBMC 11 the XBMCbuntu way originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 May 2012 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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