UserOS Home Server is a Variation of Ubuntu Linux with software pre-packaged for use on a home server.

UserOS Home Server is basically a heavily modified version of Canoncial’s Xubuntu 8.04 operating system (which itself is a modified version of Debian) that includes a number of extra applications to turn it into a Home Server, features including MythTV for digital TV recording and streaming, VLC media player, BackupPC for - funnily enough - backing up your PC; and so on.

PC User's UserOS Home Server can turn just about any PC into a server which will back up every PC on your home network, stream video and audio, record TV and much more.

1. MythTV - yeah, everyone knows about MythTV. But did you know that MythTV not only captures digital free-to-air TV but can also stream it around your home network? MythTV comes as two parts - a back-end application that takes care of capturing and recording digital TV broadcasts from your PC’s digital TV tuner card; and a front-end application that displays those images.

In a nutshell, you set up the backend on your “home server” PC and load the front-end app on your clients - the only problem with this is you need to have Linux on your client PCs as MythTV only runs on Linux, not Windows - well, not easily anyway.

You set each client’s version of MythTV to point to the server backend’s IP address and when you launch MythTV on the client, the backend will start streaming digital TV over the network to the client. It’s a really cool feature that can enable you to watch digital TV in a room where you may not have a aerial socket.

Streaming movies and music

2. VLC - Yep, I’m sure everyone knows about VLC but it has one very cool feature. Like MythTV, you can use VLC to stream video and music around your home network. It works a little differently in that you run VLC on the server and tell it to stream its data to a particular client. You run VLC on the client, tell it to pick up the stream and it plays it.

You can also stream to several PCs at the same time by simply starting up multiple instances of VLC on the server and get each instance to point to a different client. Of course, the more clients you load up on the server, the harder it and the network have to work but there are ways around that too.

If you have a slow network, try transcoding the video/audio first. VLC can do this and by transcoding it down to a lower bit rate, you sacrifice a bit of quality but you send less data across the network and that may make the difference between dropping frames and not.

The good thing with VLC is there are version for Linux and Windows so you can use it with Windows clients and simply store all of your music and movies on your “home server”.

Backing up client PCs and folders

3. BackupPC - this is a great, if somewhat complicated, application that can do automated backups of client PCs. You can schedule weekly or daily backups of the whole client or just a particular folder. Even better, the whole thing can be remotely controlled via your web browser.

You can get back files stored by selecting a “download” option that gives you your selected files as an archive file sent via the network so you don’t have to front the server to get anything - it can all be done remotely.

Remote access

4. Vino - this is a tiny little remote access server app that comes by default in Ubuntu but isn’t included in Xubuntu. By setting up Vino, you can use the Xubuntu or Ubuntu Remote Desktop application and control your “home server” remotely, as if you were sitting in front of the server with a keyboard and mouse.

Vino works well with the RealVNC Remote Desktop client tool available free for Windows and gives you full control of Xubuntu/Ubuntu.

Windows shared folder access

5. Samba - this is the must-have app that gives Xubuntu the ability to read and write Windows folders over a network. You use this to enable Windows clients to share folders on your “home server” so that clients can use it as a central storage server. You can set up shared or private folders with password protection but as with most things, don’t rely on it for super-private documents as most private folders with password protection can be hacked one way or another.