Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category
Our Ubuntu Linux Project
If you’ve spent any time talking tech in the last several years, you’ve no doubt heard mention of Linux. For years, it’s been kind of the geek alternative to modern operating systems (MacOS, Windows); hell, while at MIT, I ran an early version of SUSE next to my Windows box and iBook…just because I thought it was the right thing to do.
The truth is, Linux really is cool. It’s based on Unix (like OSX), but it’s much more about being a Unix OS than OSX. Because Linux is open source, there has always been development challenges that result in limited driver support, a high knowledge barrier to entry, and a host of benefits that never quite outweighed the drawbacks for the average computer user.
Ubuntu may have finally figured a way around all that.
We’ve had “build a Linux server box” on our list of things to do here at the Geek Ranch for almost a year, and it wasn’t until one grandfather’s garage yielded an abandoned Celeron machine that we actually snapped to it. With a sub 2.0GHz machine, packed with 1GB of RAM and a toasted HDD, we went to work (yeah, we replaced the hard drive with a 300GB Maxtor discount from CompUSA).
Since this post focuses on how great Ubuntu is, I need to take a sidebar and talk about how we got our installation discs. You can download all sorts of versions of Ubuntu from their website, but we ordered installation discs FOR FREE (as in beer), also available on their website. The shipment took several weeks, but the package included versions for Apple machines, 32-bit PCs, and 64-bit PCs. This is one of the coolest features I’ve seen in a LInux distro to date; so cool that I’ve added this paragraph, in lieu of the original paranthetical note that this post originally had. Given that the discs come with a “Live CD” version, you can throw them in any machine and run Ubuntu without installing a thing. Cool. Seriously, cool.
This is where the post starts to wind to a close, unfortunately. We pulled the install/live boot discs from the shelf; Ubuntu installed in 23 minutes (after the live boot), and within 25 minutes we were looking at a clean GNOME interface on a freshly installed copy of Ubuntu. Automatically detected was our sound card, our ethernet card (internet…woohoo!), and our external hard drives. Everything was smooth…except for that terribly annoying 640×480 resolution, which couldn’t be modified from the preferences.
As it turns out, older NVidia GeForce cards are not supported out of the box (no NVidia cards are supported out of the box), and we had to install the additional drivers to fully use our video card’s capability. Three Google searches pointed us in the right direction there, however, and we were running at crisp screen resolutions in about five minutes.
We’ve since combined all of the household music on the file server (via Samba and OSX), set up a mt-daapd music server that shares all of our music to active iTunes installations on our network, created Samba logins and home directories for all members of the house…all in the span of two or three sporadically relevant days.
If one of the goals of the Ubuntu is to provide a Linux distribution that is usable for the massess, they’re right there. Trust me.
technorati tags:ubuntu, linux, fileserver, osx