Universal Media Server | Forum

I'm planning on moving my UMS install to a dedicated box in the coming days, but I was wondering if I should go with Windows or Linux.

My primary concern is the amount of effort required to install and maintain - Windows is a pretty known quantity there (patch Tuesdays), but Linux is somewhat less clear - from what I'm reading, getting UMS installed on Linux is far more difficult than it is on Windows since it doesn't come in any distro's package manager, and upgrades are likewise no fun.

here's the most recent post about how to install it on linux: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2420

do you already have the dedicated box and what kind of hardware is it running? you should know that a headless linux (i.e. only command line, no gui) is a lot less straining on the hardware.
also for windows you have to pay for it, linux is free.

if your not familiar with command lines at all, and you don't want to put much effort in, go for windows. if you've worked with command lines or even linux before, try it out. if you're not sure about it, get virtual box and try it there first.

once you got it running in linux, maintaining it is pretty simple. two commands to update all software installed through package manager and to update ums:
-stop service
-download new version
-extract new version
-copy files
-start service

Agent_Rocket wrote:do you already have the dedicated box and what kind of hardware is it running?

Now that I read over what I wrote before, I realize should probably have put "dedicated" in quotes as the OS is dedicated but the hardware is shared at the hypervisor level. That aside, I've had the box(es) for quite a while now. Each has 2x Xeon L5520 CPUs and 72 GB of RAM, and UMS will be moving between them as necessary.

Agent_Rocket wrote:you should know that a headless linux (i.e. only command line, no gui) is a lot less straining on the hardware.

Are you referring to the display stack in general, or to UMS's Java-based GUI specifically?

Agent_Rocket wrote:also for windows you have to pay for it, linux is free.

I have an MSDN account so this difference is not very important - this is for testing purposes only, of course

Agent_Rocket wrote:if your not familiar with command lines at all, and you don't want to put much effort in, go for windows. if you've worked with command lines or even linux before, try it out. if you're not sure about it, get virtual box and try it there first.

I'm looking for whichever will require the least amount of my time over the long term. If spending a day or 2 upfront means that ongoing maintenance time/effort is minimal (meaning less than doing Windows Update once a month), then it'd be worth the upfront investment.

Raident wrote:

Agent_Rocket wrote:you should know that a headless linux (i.e. only command line, no gui) is a lot less straining on the hardware.

Are you referring to the display stack in general, or to UMS's Java-based GUI specifically?

i meant the operating system in general. especially the ram. if you had planned to use some old pc with less than 4gb of ram, windows would have been out of the question. but with the specs you mentioned earlier, it won't matter.

Raident wrote:I'm looking for whichever will require the least amount of my time over the long term. If spending a day or 2 upfront means that ongoing maintenance time/effort is minimal (meaning less than doing Windows Update once a month), then it'd be worth the upfront investment.

on both systems you can automatize a lot of the maintenance work. i think you know how to keep windows up to date, on linux it's 2-3 command line commands you either have to run manually or set up a scheduled task (called "cronjob") for.

updating UMS on Linux isn't that hard. stop service -> download and extract new version -> copy files -> start service. all in all about 5 commands in the command line and of course you can write a script to do it (figuring out the newest version could be a bit tricky in a script) and make it another cronjob.

one more thing to consider are regular backups. depending on how you want to handle this, they are probably easier to do with windows, because with windows mounting an external drive happens automatically when it's plugged in, on linux it takes a little bit more effort.

bottom line is, that the maintenance work on both systems is pretty similar, but on linux you'll have to know the commands on windows you can just click stuff.

PS: i'm talking about headless linux (specifically ubuntu as i don't have any experience with other distros). linux with a gui should be almost the same as windows.