Can anyone tell me what the minimum hard drive disk size requirement is for a frontend-only install? I know for Knoppmyth a 10GB drive worked just fine. Would this be the case for LinHES as well? I am considering a solid-state disk for my new Frontend and I want to make sure I have enough disk space.

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE

I have an old 10 gig drive (REALLY old) in my frontend. I can check the free space, but I believe it's 60 %.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

Nice, thx.

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE

I'd say more then 4g to be safe. But what about diskless?

As noted here I am running an R6 FE fine with a 4GB drive and 20% free.

I agree with Too Many Secrets. Why bother with a drive at all. Diskless is the way to go.

Diskless as in run from the CD? Then I can't use the DVD drive for watching DVDs... Plus, I don't believe you can run 0.22 that way, right? I think a drive just offers more flexibility and seems more like a permanent frontend.

Diskless is fine for a temporary frontend, but I prefer to have a drive for a permanent installation.

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE

A diskless frontend boots off the network and the root partition for the FE is served by NFS from the backend. It should be fine for a permanent installation. I have two that have separate configurations. The configuration tweaks (xorg, remotes etc) are stored in separate NFS roots.

If the hardware configuration of the frontends is similar enough to the backend, it is *really* easy to setup. Just pacman -S diskless-legacy and run config_diskless_frontend.bash. That creates the NFS root and configures the backend so that the two will connect. Then boot the frontend from the network and enjoy.

Meh, maybe in the future. For now I'll just stick with what makes sense to me.

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE

I'll throw in for diskless too... it might take a while to set up correctly, but it's worth it. No noisy hard drive for the frontend in my bedroom! Been running one for a few months now without issue.

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MBE/FE: R6, P4 2.8 GHz/2 GB/2 TB, GeForce 6200 512 MB, PVR-150, Cisco RNG-100 cable box
FE: R6, P4 2.0 GHz/1 GB, GeForce4 MX 420 64 MB, diskless netboot

Noisy hard drive? I find the fans on the CPU and Power Supply more than drown out any possible noise a hard drive could make.

The one complaint for a HD would be heat. Although, in a frontend, the HD should be getting hit that often...

I may look into diskless in the future, but I have this computer up and running as it is. Don't fix what aint broke, eh? Plus the WAF goes down when stuff breaks because you were "trying something"...

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE

Rereading this thread, I have to ask: Assuming it's going to be used only as a FE, why would you even want to do this? As you already noted, on an FE system the vast majority of your data is coming over the network, so except for bootup and some caching/buffering during playback the HD should barely be used.

The only reasons I can see are for quicker boot time and to minimize system footprint. In either case though an 8GB or 16GB USB stick should work just as well as a full SSD that costs 3-4 times as much... or is that what you meant?

Yeah, I was thinking of a CF to SATA adapter and a CF card. Not an actual SSD.

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE

Greg: I'm going to setup a new FE later this week with a Zotac IONITX-C. Is this really that easy? (run pacman, execute script). The backend is quite different from the Zotac. Where do you execute the script from? Backend or frontend? I'm running 0.22 does that create any caveats?

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

You run the script on the backend. The only caveat is that you need a big enough root partition (because it has to hold the root directory for the frontend too). I setup my Acer Aspire Revo R3610 last night and it was as simple as running the script and then adjusting some xorg settings. Then setting any mythtv settings that you like (themes, playback profiles etc). Im still on 0.21 but will be changing to 0.22 so I can use VDPAU on the revo.

The main problem would be if you have a card that needs a different nvidia driver. Just ssh to the frontend after it boots and remove and re-install that appropriate packages.