Hello people I just got my hands on an old PC, and I took it as a sign to finally start my on server. Right now, I’d mostly be looking into running jellyfin since I’m working on a digital music library. On the technical side, I run Mint on my laptop, so I have basic familiarity with Linux. Are there any guides you recommend that will take me through installation of OS to a functional server? Thank you!
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Hey, welcome to the concept of self-hosting! This is where I was 15+ years ago.
Realistically, I’d just recommend installing something and trying it out. You’ll iterate many time before you’ll slowly start to align somewhere I suspect, in terms of software/approaches etc.
If you want the very first steps, then why not simply connect your old PC to a monitor and install a Desktop version of Mint? It’s super-“wrong”, but it’ll get you started. Once you reach a stage of not wanting to waste memory/CPU on a graphical system, you’ll be able to do something like
systemctl disable lightdm.serviceand voila, graphics don’t load on start anymore. Once you get even more confident,apt remove gdm3 xfce4 xfdesktopwill remove any extra disk space (I’m dropping DE names that I approximately remember off the top of my head). With the packages for graphics gone, your system is indistinguishable from a server now.Overall it’s a nice path to walk, or at least it was fun and somewhat educative and very frustrating and giving a sense of control for me personally. Do you have any specific questions?
I know Jellyfin/Emby is compatible with music, but I’m advising you now to not try and cram all your media in one software. I recommend Navidrome as a music hoster. The con is that I haven’t written a guide for it, as I run Proxmox it was almost too easy to need one.
As you’re just starting out I’d recommend picking any Linux distro, putting the ISO on a USB drive and booting the server machine from it to install. Well, you know how to install an OS. Next, install Navidrome (guide) via the Linux or Docker guides, modify the config file to point to your music folder and change any setting you like, for example the port, and run it via systemctl or docker.
After that, login via browser with the given admin creds, make a user account for you and anyone else, install slskd for downloading and beets for correctly organising into the music directory, set up a reverse proxy to point to the Navidrome UI or connect via IP from any Subsonic client or web browser.
If you want you can install Proxmox from the start - I found it incredibly handy to make different containers and VMs to handle different projects, and in terms of Navidrome I got the install script from tteck, ran it, and once done I modified the toml variables to what I wanted and restarted the service. Plug & play.
