Media Server on a Budget

[supercoach]

Hi all.

I have an interesting (I hope) dilemma. I love unRAID and the way it manages hard drive capacity for me. I also have no desire to run two separate machines for storage and for media serving/playing. I know that XBMC runs happily on a G3220 with plenty of CPU left for unRAID to do its thing.

The problem lies in the fact that the G3220 doesn't support vt-d, so I'm left needing a solution where I can get the media player running natively to get both to coexist. Having read through the forums, it seems like there's a possibility of running unRAID 6 on a full Slackware install which should allow me to do what I need. I've been using Linux for about 20 years, so I can handle the dependency hell that's going to come from installing and maintaining Slackware, but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel if it's been done before.

 

My question therefore is two-part:

1) Has anyone done what I'm looking to do with unRAID 6 and do you have any tips?

2) Would it be possible to port to a system with a package manager and if so, what pitfalls might arise if I do so?

 

Thanks in advance for any replies.