Announcement

**notnick** · 03-19-2017, 09:45 PM

I like VB. I hope more development happens. If further development doesn't happen, it will be eclipsed by other NAS OS.

**agillis** · 03-20-2017, 05:41 PM

VortexBox has been around for 8 years (as of this month) and it will be around for a long time. We have a very recent version of LMS in our VortexBox repo and we will continue to update it as well as the other packages.

We will move to a new version of Fedora at some point. They release one every 6 months we don't need to pick up each one. We usually go to every 4th or 5th release.

**Mr. Bill** · 03-20-2017, 07:53 PM

Originally posted by agillis View Post

VortexBox has been around for 8 years (as of this month) and it will be around for a long time. We have a very recent version of LMS in our VortexBox repo and we will continue to update it as well as the other packages.

We will move to a new version of Fedora at some point. They release one every 6 months we don't need to pick up each one. We usually go to every 4th or 5th release.

This is great news for those of us that rely on the Vortexbox software. I'm looking foreword to a long and great future for the Vortexbox software and can't wait for future updates.

Thanks, Bill

**loggerhead** · 03-29-2017, 11:02 PM

Originally posted by agillis View Post

VortexBox has been around for 8 years (as of this month) and it will be around for a long time. We have a very recent version of LMS in our VortexBox repo and we will continue to update it as well as the other packages.

We will move to a new version of Fedora at some point. They release one every 6 months we don't need to pick up each one. We usually go to every 4th or 5th release.

I absolute love VB; it is a staple in my home. I would love to have a Plex update to at least 1.4.1 so I can use the Plex DVR. Any thoughts on when an upgrade to this version will be available?

Thanks

**jimmi** · 03-30-2017, 12:28 AM

Originally posted by loggerhead View Post

I absolute love VB; it is a staple in my home. I would love to have a Plex update to at least 1.4.1 so I can use the Plex DVR. Any thoughts on when an upgrade to this version will be available?

Thanks

If you are comfortable with using Putty or similar to access your VB, try this...

To upgrade Plex media server on Vortexbox, go to https://www.plex.tv/downloads/, select Linux,
then click the download button and right click Fedora 64-bit (RPM for Fedora 14 or newer) and click copy link location.

Then in Putty on your Vortexbox, type dnf install and right click, to copy the link location.
Finally, reboot and the new Plex will be available.

**Kees Watervrees** · 04-02-2017, 08:18 AM

Originally posted by agillis View Post

VortexBox has been around for 8 years (as of this month) and it will be around for a long time. We have a very recent version of LMS in our VortexBox repo and we will continue to update it as well as the other packages.

We will move to a new version of Fedora at some point. They release one every 6 months we don't need to pick up each one. We usually go to every 4th or 5th release.

I am also a big fan of VortexBox, even did some presentations about it at Opensource events in The Netherlands.
love to hear about the continuation.

Keep up the good work, and do'nt hesitate to let u's know if we can help to keep VortexBox alive !

**chabelo** · 05-11-2017, 09:07 AM

I'm a huge fan of the Vortexbox project and I can't thank Andrew and everyone else involved for all of their work. I am very glad to hear that Andrew intends to keep the project rolling indefinitely. I would just raise one small issue with what Andrew describes as his plan going forward. I've become a big fan of Fedora. In fact, Fedora has become my default desktop OS - this note is being written on a laptop running Fedora 25. Fedora is a tad more aggressive with EOL (end-of-life) than many other Linux distros and IMHO that is not entirely a bad thing. However, that means all Fedora releases face an 18 month lifespan after which there are no more updates. I believe it is just not wise to run any OS in the current environment that does not receive regular security updates, especially one running on a server that is meant to remain connected to the Internet 24/7. The good news is that Fedora release updates are becoming ever easier to run and have become extremely robust, so perhaps it may be possible to keep VB "rolling" without taxing Andrew and Co so much.

**willie92** · 05-18-2017, 04:02 PM

Originally posted by jimmi View Post

If you are comfortable with using Putty or similar to access your VB, try this...

To upgrade Plex media server on Vortexbox, go to https://www.plex.tv/downloads/, select Linux,
then click the download button and right click Fedora 64-bit (RPM for Fedora 14 or newer) and click copy link location.

Then in Putty on your Vortexbox, type dnf install and right click, to copy the link location.
Finally, reboot and the new Plex will be available.

If you're still using an earlier version of VortexBox (like 2.3 for those of that have our VortexBox tied to Elan) you can still use "yum install [right click]" as above to install the newest Plex. Make sure you grab the right version (I needed the 32-bit version).

**brubacca** · 06-02-2018, 06:09 PM

I really like to build a new Vortexbox based off of the new Intel Coffee Lake Processors. I'm sure that isn't the best idea based on Fedora 23. Any chance we'll be seeing a new Vortexbox in the near future?

**dyohn** · 06-03-2018, 09:20 AM

I abandoned LMS some time ago and use VB to host Roon. I love this combination.

**Transporter** · 06-06-2018, 09:54 AM

Andrew, thanks for the Update on the near future of Vortexbox. I look forward to many years of future Updates as well as continued stellar use out of Vortexbox.

Speaking of Vortexbox Updates, those running VBA 2.3 because you have pressed an older 32 bit Donor PC into service are going to be permanently stuck at 2.3 because ALL current and future Fedora versions only support 64 Bit machines. To be able to move to the latest Update when it comes out if in that situation, one will need to purchase a Vortexbox or find/buy a newer 64bit Donor machine. For those that were first purchasers of a factory Vortexbox, I don't know if they were 32 or 64 bit machines. But you can try these commands from a CMD Prompt or by SSHing into a headless Vortexbox:

Code:

more /proc/cpuinfo

or

Code:

sudo dmidecode -t 2

or

Code:

sudo dmidecode | more

or

Code:

lspci

Then do a search on the Motherboard or Processor that comes back to determine if it is 32 or 64 bit
.

**agillis** · 06-07-2018, 09:08 AM

All the VortexBoxes ever sold by us, VortexBox UK, or VortexBox AU are 64-bit machines.

**cpt_paranoia** · 08-09-2018, 03:38 PM

Originally posted by Transporter View Post

Speaking of Vortexbox Updates, those running VBA 2.3 because you have pressed an older 32 bit Donor PC into service are going to be permanently stuck at 2.3

Well, that comment might answer my query here:

https://www.vortexbox.org/forum/supp...-architectures

All I need to do now is to get past the installer problem, which seems to be barfing at the sfdisk stage:

Code:

No partition table exists in target disk /dev/sda. try to initialise one so that we can get the disk size by parted... Running: parted -s /dev/sda mklabel msdos
done!
Running sfdisk --force /dev/sda < /home/partimag/vortexbox23-recovery/sda-pt.sf
sfdisk: Checking that no-one is using this disk right now ...
sfdisk: OK
sfdisk: unrecognized input: dos

Disk /dev/sda: 19457 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Old situation:
Units: cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda2          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
This was done by sfdisk --force /dev/sda < /home/partimg/vortexbox23-recovery/sda-pt.sf
Failed to create a partition table on this disk: /dev/sda
Is this disk too small: /dev/sda?
Program terminated!!
Check/var/log/clonezilla.log for details.

The clonezilla.log file gives no further details.

I note that sda-pt.sf defines a fifth partition, /dev/sda5 that overlaps /dev/sda4, starting 1MiB later than /dev/sda4, and being 1MiB smaller (3337MiB vs 3338MiB).
This partition table setup is consistent with the sda-pt.parted and sda-pt.parted.compact files in /home/partimg/vortexbox23-recovery/
I'm using an 8GB SSD, which appears to be big enough to support the required 4096MiB partition table.

Once the install had barfed, I dropped into the command shell, and was able to use parted to succesfully create the required partitions on the disk, set sda3 up as swap, set sda2&5 as ext4. So there doesn't seem to be a problem with the disk.

Code:

sudo parted /dev/sda
    unit mib
    mkpart primary 1 2
    mkpart primary 2 502
    mkpart primary 502 758
    mkpart extended 758 4096
    mkpart logical 759 4096
    quit
sudo mkswap /dev/sda3
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda2
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda5

Re-running the install simply destroyed that partition table, leaving no partitions behind.

So it looks like there's a problem with the installer for some reason, in that it cannot create the partitions.

Has anyone actually used vortexbox23-recovery.zip to install VB 2.3?

I downloaded the ISO file, and used Rufus to create a bootable USB from the ISO. It warned that certain syslinux components were out-of-date, and downloaded replacements.
But that still gave the same problem.

Is aynone still using or developing VortexBox? Or has the project died?

**cpt_paranoia** · 08-10-2018, 07:27 AM

I have managed to install v2.3 on an x86 architecture machine.

It appears that the automatic installer doesn't work, so I have written a manual install script. See this thread for details:

https://www.vortexbox.org/forum/supp...vortexbox-v2-3

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