Craft several custom bash scripts that would stop the Plex service when the external HDD holding the movies was disconnected and to restart the service when the external HDD was reconnected, launch conky upon system start-up, and set the screen resolution for my remote desktop session via Teamviewer to 1280x1024 (I can provide all these scripts and any additional detail to anyone that wants them, just let me know).Install Plex, Teamviewer (Teamviewer was used for remote desktop access for anytime I would need to remotely connect and help my Father-in-law out with any "Plex" issues), and Veeam (Veeam was used to make a backup of the entire system so that I could duplicate the setup to any other PC in the future and not have to recreate everything).Install and tweak conky to provide pertinent system information on the desktop (can be seen in the upper right corner of the desktop screencap above) such as the assigned IP address(s), disk space usage, cpu/memory performance, and, most importantly, an indicator of whether the Plex service is running and active or not.My tweaking tasks consisted of the following which I'll spare you the details of: After installation I began working on what ultimately consumed most of my time in regards to this project, tweaking the system to meet my needs. I put Lubuntu 18.04 on a bootable flash drive and got Lubuntu installed in no time. If you need a graphical desktop and it needs to be easy on your computer resources this is my go-to. If you’re not familiar with Lubuntu, it’s a light-weight derivative of Ubuntu Linux which incorporates much less applications and includes the lean running desktop environment LXDE. I began by stripping out any remnants of Windows and installed Lubuntu. Going into this project, my goals were relatively simple: I wanted a small, portable Plex server running on Lubuntu Linux that could be connected to a wireless or a wired connection and play movies off of an external HDD connected via USB 3.0 which I could also remotely access from anywhere.Īfter the PC arrived from Amazon I got to work. With Christmas just around the corner, I decided to hook my father-in-law up and work on a Plex solution that could be put in his home and would give the exact same Plex experience he so lovingly enjoys when he's over to my family's home. I'm frequently asked (understatement of the year) if I could help establish a similar setup in their homes with the movies I've accumulated. I find it no surprise when my extended family comes over and get a kick out of the Plex experience. With this setup, we (my entire family) can stream all the movies in our library, in any room we have, via the nice and clean and elegant movie streaming interface that is Plex. The TV's in my house are either running Android TV players or Roku players and as such all support installing a local Plex Media app which in-turn hook into my primary Plex Media server. I've been able to digitally archive all my movies (my household is full of movie buffs) and store them on my local NAS at home, which my virtual Ubuntu Server running Plex mounts and plays. I've ran a Plex Media server at my home for years now and I've become quiet fond of it.
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