October 2011 Archives

By way of Planet Debian, I found Vincent Sanders' article on the HP ProLiant MicroServer he bought for use at home instead of a dedicated NAS appliance.

This is by no means a blade server. It's a squat little box. And the HP ProLiant MicroServer line starts at $329.

Here are general specs from HP:

What's new

• Faster processor -- AMD Turion II Neo 1.5GHz
• Choice of preinstalled OS's includes Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials

Features

Simple to Own and Easy to Use

• Server performance but at a PC price
• Designed to make adding drives or peripherals a minimal effort
• At a 22 dBA noise level, it is quiet for ergonomic working environment
• Space-saving; ideal for the small office

Proven HP Dependability and Support

• HP has built a reputation of dependability by conducting some of the most rigorous and thorough testing in the industry
• System testing and process control ensures only the most dependable products for the customers
• Worldwide network of HP trained service

Reliability and Expandability

• Error checking and correction (ECC) memory minimizes the likelihood of memory corruption
• RAID 0, 1 prevents data loss and ensures around the clock reliability
• Up to four LFF SATA pluggable hard disks and up to 8 GB of RAM

That's pretty interesting. It's small, all right. The ECC memory is very server-ish. And not everybody wants or has a rack set up to stuff a server into. This can sit on a table or shelf somewhere.

While there is a $329 model, the best deal seems to be the $349 version with double the RAM (2 GB). The system ships with a smallish 250 GB drive, but the whole point is that you can buy drives for the four bays and just plug 'em in.

Vincent bought his HP box to run Debian, which is what I'd be doing. The HP PDF lists the following as "supported" OSes:

• Microsoft Windows 2008 Standard Edition R2
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

It doesn't say which versions of RHEL will run, but I imagine that 5.x and 6.x are good to go. And if it runs Debian Squeeze, it will probably run a current Ubuntu release as well.

Looking back at Vincent's original article, he has what looks to me like a somewhat complicated RAID setup for his four 2 TB drives, with 1 GB of ext2 in RAID 1 across four drives for /boot, ext3 with LVM in RAID 5 for the rest of the data, plus a small partition at the beginning for GRUB. I'm a little bit hazy on exactly how one does this.

He cites reports of reliability problems in ext4 as a reason for choosing ext3 for the big RAID partition. I'm running ext3 with LVM in my Debian Squeeze laptop, and it has been 100 percent solid.

I really need to read up on RAID and configuring Linux servers with RAID and LVM ...

I never really considered myself a GNOME user. Though I am. I've used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe's Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK in TinyCore. But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution.

And more often than not, that's GNOME 2. And I've been using Debian Squeeze with GNOME 2 since November 2010 -- almost a year now -- and using it for more of my work than ever.

I don't consider myself a "power user," but I am pushing this desktop environment and this distribution pretty hard. I've got a lot of software installed -- most from the Debian repositories, some from other repos and a few packages from third parties (usually the upstream developers themselves). I run Dropbox. I create, edit and mix audio, I edit video. I crunch hundreds of images. Code web pages. Write. Browse the web with Iceweasel and Google Chrome. Watch TV shows from Hulu and various other sites, including CBS.com.

I can suspend/resume without rebooting for days at a time. That's probably the best thing about this particular instance of Linux and my particular hardware (the not-terribly impressive Lenovo G555). I've never had this level of functionality before in Linux or BSD.

NetworkManager has been great. I've used it to connect to wired, WiFi and 3G networks, all seamlessly. My old-school ext3 filesystems managed under encrypted LVM have run perfectly the whole time. I do backups via rsync.

It all just works. It's Debian Stable with the now old and abandoned GNOME 2.

What will happen to Debian's default desktop environment by the time the current Testing distribution, Wheezy, itself becomes Stable sometime in early 2013? Will GNOME 3 have settled down by then, or will Debian turn to another DE, maybe Xfce, for its main desktop? I'll worry about it then. If this hardware holds out, it'll probably do so with Debian Squeeze and the 2.6.37 kernel that handles this hardware perfectly.

GNOME's supposed to be slow. I've really never found that to be true -- and certainly not on this laptop made in March 2010.

It's not "pure" Squeeze. I have Debian Backports, the Mozilla Debian APT archive, Liquorix (and now newer kernels from Backports if I want them), Debian Multimedia, plus repositories for Google Chrome and Dropbox. But the core is a distribution that "froze" some time in mid-2010 and released in February 2011. It keeps on working, and so do I. Can't argue with that.

Should you (and I) have a presence on every damn social network favored by both geeks and civilians?

When a particular uber-geek (I'm thinking about you, @fabsh) leaves one social network (Identi.ca) for another (Google+), do we follow suit? Or just follow. Or not?

I've heard a lot of "well-followed" geek-types comment on how much more quickly they've been "circled" by followers in Google Plus in contrast to their Twitter following and are using the rapid uptake of their Google+ musings as a sign to put more emphasis into the new social network while doing much less with the old (Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook).

ZDNet writer David Gerwitz is so fed up with the way his co-located Linux server responded to an upgrade (by not running) that he's made a huge deal out of giving up Linux for Windows. On a server.

Fellow ZDNet writer and Linux partisan Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols (aka SJVN) wonders what all the shouting is about.

Ever since Ubuntu shipped its first long-term-support release, the 6.06 Dapper Drake (one of my all-time favorites by the way), the distro's LTS editions have enjoyed three years of support on the desktop and five years on the server.

Now Canonical is extending desktop support for the upcoming 12.04 LTS (to be named Precise Pangolin) to a full five years on both the desktop and server, making the release that much more compelling for enterprise users and others (like myself) who might not necessarily stick with the release for the full five years but want the option of doing so.

I decided to give the OpenShot video editor for Linux another try.

Not entirely satisfied with my last effort in OpenShot, I wanted to try something else, and that something turned out to be Blender's Video Sequence Editor feature. That was a resounding failure. I had no idea how to do just about anything, and I find the Blender UI extremely uninviting.

My editing needs are neither extensive nor complicated. I want to gather and trim clips, put them in order, slap opening and closing credits on them and then render the final video in a format acceptable for Brightcove and YouTube.

I've seen these Google+ widgets popping up all over. Here's where you can get one.

If you look at the top of this blog, in the left column, you can see a version of the widget that "fits" this layout, with a smaller overall width, smaller button and smaller type. You can also change the color of just about everything.