Loading the media servers

This is the easy part, install all the base packages that will be needed for the server.  The first step is to install the base media serving applications.  

1) Plex Media Server
Download the .deb package for your architecture (x64 in my case), then install:

sudo dpkg -i plexmediaserver_0.9.7.12.407-db37d6d_amd64.deb

Setup is fairly easy, you can start the web app from the applications list.  Point it at the media locations, let it finish scanning, then go in and tweak any incorrect matches by the automated title agent. This installs a service, named plexmediaserver. To restart:

sudo service plexmediaserver restart

2) Subsonic
Unfortunately, Plex is not quite nearly as full featured as Plex when it comes to music.  First you need Java, i went with the open package for convenience, but I will probably switch to the official Sun JDK at some point:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

Then, download the .deb package from the above site and install:

sudo dpkg -i subsonic-4.7.deb

To restart:

sudo service subsonic restart 

Donate if you can, there's only 1 developer, and he's done a great job with the project.  Once finished, login via the web interface (http://localhost:4040) and change the admin password.  Point to the music directories, and you're done! Eventually we'll get to setting up SSL, for now it's unsecured.

3) Calibre
 I use calibre to manage my e-book collection.  It is very full-featured and open-source.  It also comes with an OPDS web-server so that you can serve up the library to various e-reader applications, like Aldiko, Moon Reader & FBReader. I ended up going with a different OPDS server, since Calibre does not support SSL currently.  Regardless, to install it

sudo apt-get install calibre

4) Calibre OPDS PHP Server
Great server, currently under active development.  This is the other piece of the e-book server.  The setup here is fairly complicated, and has lots of dependencies, namely NGINX, which is going to require a much longer description.  This will be covered later.


And Done! In fact, at this point, you could expose the various servers to the world over their respective ports on this system.  I will not at this point. Instead I will encapsulate the all servers behind a common web portal on port 443, using my own SSL certificate, web domain, and a unified LDAP login.