mt-daapd (Firefly) and Hawking WiFi card - ACX111

My latest linux hack is to use Firefly (mt-daapd) to stream music to other computers in my network. I had been sharing my music with via Samba. However, I found iTunes to be slow to read my music library via a shared network drive (Samba). So I tried using Firefly Media Server (previously known as mt-daapd - a service that serves music to iTunes as well as other players like rhythmbox).

Firefly installed quite easily, and seemed to start up just fine. The log files showed that it found my music library, and that the web portal that Firefly comes with showed that everything was running just fine. But my iTunes just couldn't find see Firefly on my media computer (running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn).

I tried almost everything to debug this. I used avahi, I tried compiling a more recent build of mt-daapd, nothing. I tried running mt-daapd (installed from Ubuntu repositories) on a laptop running Feisty, and it worked. iTunes could see it, rhythmbox could see it, and everything was good.

It drove me nuts because I couldn't figure what the issue was. I spent hours reinstalling mt-daapd and avahi. Finally, I read that some wireless routers and wireless cards with linux don't work well. So I hooked my Ubuntu media PC up to ethernet and disabled the wifi card. All of sudden Firefly worked just fine.

So it turns out that my wireless card (Hawking HWC54G) which used the ACX111 driver just didn't work well with mt-daapd (or more precisely, Avahi). So after replacing my Hawking wifi card with a DLink DWL-G510 which uses an Atheros chipset, I know have Firefly serving up my music as it should.

It works quite well and is definitely more responsive than sharing my music via Samba.