Last time I wrote a post in this series it was looking at upgrading some of the hardware that I have. This time it is looking at task separation, or in another way, using mediapc to do some stuff like I have looked at previously.
This keeps coming up because I have four computers and one of them hardly gets used. Granted there is a case for using PC4 to evaluate new editions of Debian but I don't have anything to run on it. If I make it the media playback computer then mediapc is redundant.
So the idea of using mediapc to do some of the day to day stuff such as email, perhaps with just a single screen, is gaining some traction at the moment. If I follow through on this idea then pc4 will get the second screen currently on mediapc for playback purposes and will be set up to play stuff. However I expect the master media library will stay on mediapc with its RAID array for now. We will just sync as we do with the other computers that play media.
mediapc will have to be set up to hibernate and may need a reinstall of debian because with sddm running on top the hibernation is not very reliable (it works well with lightdm).
The result is that mainpc would be set up just for maps alongside serverpc. There is quite an advantage for mediapc in that it would have one screen dedicated to stuff like email (there is no new mail widget in KDE at the moment that can tell me when a message has come in) and can be left with that up all the time so I can just glance at it. At the moment I can only monitor new messages with my phone.
The tricky part is I can't use a third keyboard and mouse easily in the current layout (although mediapc's keyboard is accessible, it isn't ideally placed for typing) and so it may end up that mediapc would be remoted with Remmina or else I just press a button when I need to switch the main keyboard onto it.
Some testing is going to start fairly soon before I have too many more crashes on mainpc but it is tricky because all the resources are on mainpc and I can't see myself moving files across to mediapc so there will be a disadvantage for it in terms of accessing stuff over a network to some degree.
