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Ask Slashdot: Best *nix Distro For a Dynamic File Server?
An anonymous reader (citing "silly workplace security policies") writes "I'm in charge of developing for my workplace a particular sort of 'dynamic' file server for handling scientific data. We have all the hardware in place, but can't figure out what *nix distro would work best. Can the great minds at Slashdot pool their resources and divine an answer? Some background: We have sensor units scattered across a couple square miles of undeveloped land, which each collect ~500 gigs of data per 24h. When these drives come back from the field each day, they'll be plugged into a server featuring a dozen removable drive sleds. We need to present the contents of these drives as one unified tree (shared out via Samba), and the best way to go about that appears to be a unioning file system. There's also requirement that the server has to boot in 30 seconds or less off a mechanical hard drive. We've been looking around, but are having trouble finding info for this seemingly simple situation. Can we get FreeNAS to do this? Do we try Greyhole? Is there a distro that can run unionfs/aufs/mhddfs out-of-the-box without messing with manual recompiling? Why is documentation for *nix always so bad?""
Perhaps because new versions spring up so fast or something?
I'm running a fairly new Mint Cinnamon that I'm not quite used to yet, and after a few hours of trial & error and reading various googled suggestions I failed to install any kind of drivers for my external AU-25. Ok, so I just plugged in my guitar as front mike instead.
But then I wanted to play along with my Megadeth-mp3's. The only really good MP3-player I know on Linux is XMMS, and that one is apparently not very populair anymore, so I can't install it with apt (just something called XMMS2 which apparently can do anything except play MP3's).
Well, nobody can prevent me from building it, right? I've been using Linux since 1994, but after 2 hours of trying to crack "configure: error: *** GLIB >= 1.2.2 not installed - please install first ***" by installing just about every dependency on the entire internet, I gave up and apt-get installed rythmbox.
Which kind of worked fine (though it couldn't sort my mp3's in s sane order, which is why I wanted XMMS in the first place) until I got tired of music and wanted to stop. So, I clicked the X in the upper-right corner... the window dissapeared, but the music continued. Great. Had to ps and kill, and now my beer supply is out of sync with my enthusiam for music.
So yeah, Unix/Linux documentation sucks.