Last week I've ordered the multi-talented music system NAS-Z200IR [1], as Sony nicely named it. It's just one flat panel with loud speakers and remote control with 3.5 inch LCD screen. You can plug your Ipod to the system, an USB-stick, play internet radio, ordinary FM/AM-radio. It is actually that ancient that it still can play CD:s, if you recall what they look like.

Another feature that I found interesting was the support for DLNA [2] (Digital Living Network Alliance), ie being able to stream media from a DLNA-compliant computer or NAS (Network Attached Storage) at home via WIFI. As I have some music in my Ubuntu 9.10 box I thought it would be nice if I could stream music from that to the new sound system. In order to get going I needed to install a server supporting the DLNA standard.

minidlna [3] seemed to be the right choice, a server program developed by an employee at NetGear, DLNA-compliant and lightweight. The server was very easy to compile, install and configure. As I connected to the server from the Sony piece everything showed up and I could browse the music. But for some reason, when trying to play the music, nothing worked, I just got the "Cannot play" error message on the Z200. I tried messing around with different configuration options, and they are actually not that many, but without success.

I decided to give another software a chance and as I wanted something lightweight I headed for uShare [4]. This was even easier to setup as I choose to install using aptitude. Then by doing a

dpkg-reconfigure ushare

and specifying the music dir and setting the PS3 compatibiliy to yes (as it is a Sony I assume this will be needed also for the Z200, but I haven't tried to set to no) I started uShare. Voilá! It just worked, music from my Ubuntu 9.10 laptop just flowed out of the speakers.

// John