Why Not Windows?

One common question we hear in connection with SlimCar is "why can't I run my MasterLibrary on a Windows machine?"

As much as we'd like to make this happen to increase the appeal of the project, technical issues prevent this. The reasons are fairly simple and are down to the different filesystems used for Linux/UNIX machines compared to Windows machines.

• On a Windows PC, file systems are split up into "drives", each with an identifying letter (such as C:). A full path might be something like C:\SqueezeCenter. Note that backslashes are used.

• On a Linux/UNIX machine, file systems are all merged together as children of the root folder - "/". A full path could be /var/slim. Note that forward slashes are used.

• Because of the way SqueezeCenter is designed, the paths used for music, playlists and certain preferences are hardcoded. One of the design goals of SlimCar is to allow database portability between your MasterLibrary and the car system (so you don't need to run rescans on the carPC), this means that paths must be the same at both ends (home and car).

• SlimCar is a Linux OS and hence uses paths like "/mnt/music", "/mnt/playlists" and so on. The use of symlinks (a pointer or shortcut) allows these paths to be mirrored on the MasterLibrary system very easily, without actually having to move any files. Unfortunately there is no way to map Linux/UNIX paths to a Windows system!

Essentially, this means that the MasterLibrary must be UNIX-derived. This means that you can use Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X and various other OS', but Windows is not an option and (unless there are major changes in how SqueezeCenter works), it probably never will be.

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