So, what is it? It's basically just a hard drive in an enclosure...BUT! The novelty is that it has an ethernet jack, and it's running a customized version of linux. Jack this badboy into your network, and you have an always-on storage solution that is accessible to all of your machines. Extra bonus: if you move your iTunes library onto this disk, it will automagically appear as a shared library on any computer running itunes on your network. Sweet. And for your non-itunes linux box, the same library appears as a hierarchical directory of mp3's so you're golden there too.
Making it work on OS X and iTunes
I set it up on my MacBook Pro first, and it was dead easy. Just use the installation CD that comes with the drive. It was a little unclear how the iTunes thing was going to work, but I just reset the library location in iTunes, then used the "Consolidate library" function to move all of my music to the Linkstation (this took several hours). This procedure is outlined by Apple here. After this completed, it "just worked".
Making it work on Linux
You will be shocked to learn that there's less "it just worked" in this description. However, it wasn't too bad. Basically, you need to mount the drive as a Samba share (which is odd, since samba is for mounting Windows disks, and the Linkstation is running Linux!). However! Samba is apparently no longer called "smbfs", it's now called "cifs". I don't know why, and I don't care enough to find out. Anyway, the relevant command (issued as root) is:
mkdir /mnt/netdisk (only need to do this once </obvious>)mount -t cifs -o user=admin,password=your_password 192.168.1.127:/share /mnt/netdisk
(where "user" and "password" params should be replaced with the login info for your Linkstation, as set in the drive's installation program, and the IP address is set to the correct value as well...it's shown in the Linkstation config tool). Assuming that worked, the final step is to have it auto-mount by adding a line to your /etc/fstab:
192.168.1.127:/share /mnt/netdisk cifs credentials=/root/.creds,rw,uid=mythtv 0 0
and create the
/root/.creds, make it look like:username = admin
password = your_password
Again, this is the login information for your Linkstation. The "uid" param in the fstab line is the name of a user which will have read/write access to the disk.
Making it work on Windows
This is also quite easy. Open My Computer, then click on "My Network Places" on the left. Then click on "Add a network place" in the "Network Tasks" menu on the left. This opens the "Add Network Place Wizard", in which you will step through the following screens:
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