My first steps with Linux

If you have been following my blog for any amount of time, you have probably guessed that as an IT educator, my technical knowledge is reasonably thin. Sure I can work software, but when it comes to what goes on behind the pretty GUI I tended to be somewhat ill-informed. I had a go at installing my own Moodle a while back, but that was about as far as my back-end knowledge went.

Yet lately, I have been having a bit of a go at some serious hardware and software experiments. This was all prompted by some trouble I had with my old Dell, that was struggling to keep up. The machine has been getting slower and slower of late, but the recent arrival of iOS5 for our Apple devices caused me some serious hassles as the poor old boy had a lot of trouble dealing with the new drivers. So, time to update I said! (I have resisted doing this for a while, because my Grandfather gave me the Dell when he upgraded to a Mac – yes really!)

Then, along came our local Council’s hard waste collection and the usual proliferation of hardware beside our suburban streets. I couldn’t help myself: I grabbed a couple of drive cases (one from our own street.)  I was thinking I would just grab a new stick of RAM or two and an additional hard drive, but the end result has been way cooler.  Yes I know this is illegal, but please don’t dob me in to the authorities.  I was recycling after all

I cracked open one  drive case to find that only the hard drive had been left behind, sitting on a much better motherboard than my old Dell! No RAM though, so the hunt went on. The second case I grabbed had never been opened, the warranty sticker still intact.  In fact, the previous owner hadn’t even bothered to remove their O/S or user data.  A lesser human would have hacked their password and kept the system as is…. Another post for another time…. The happy ending is that this case had a nice big drive and compatible RAM sticks still on board.

So what to do with all this new hardware? Having spent zero dollars on some serious hardware, I felt it was appropriate to see if I could setup a working system without spending any more dough.  What I really wanted to create was a file server that would interface with our Windows laptops, and give us a place to store media and backup files.  So Linux seemed the next best place to look.  I remembered seeing a Linux distro on the cover of PC User magazine.  This seemed like a good option: it was nice and light, could be installed from a USB stick and came with instructions! Perfect!

I hooked up one of the smaller drivers to the better of the two motherboards I had inherited, and loaded up the distro on a USB.  I have to say how impressed I was with the ease of the Ubuntu install.  Went on without a hitch, although I decided to run it through a second time to get a better partition setup on the drive.  So after some consultation with a number of Linux forums we were away.  The detail that did hold me up for a while, is the Ubuntu is pretty much the only Linux flavour that doesn’t give you root access by default.  A simple entry in the command line sets it up, but it would have been nice to have been told…. It took me a little while to work out how to install new software packages too, but on discovering the Ubuntu Software Centre that all become a breeze as well.

So now I have a machine running Ubuntu on 1 stick of RAM and less than 20gb of hard drive space.  Try doing that with Windows! The next step was to try and share the drives on board.  The forums all pointed at Samba, so this was my next port of call.  I spent a good couple of weeks fiddling with config files and command line entries.  I succeeded in creating Samba users, and a pretty big mess.  As luck would have it, after removing and reinstalling Samba entirely, I happened upon a forum post that pointed at a couple of GUIs that were a bit easier to work with.  A simple way to config the Samba server, setup folder sharing settings and Samba users, and it all fell into place.  Hard drives on the Linux machine shared with Windows7 laptops!  Don’t you just love a happy ending?

So I now have a free computer, with several hundred gig of storage space, running on a free operating system and feeling a whole lot of satisfaction.  I reckon I have a bit of room left on the power supply to run another drive, so I might keep my eye open for a nice big terabyte sized hard drive to give us a bit more space (not that we really need it,) but other than that, problem solved.

The next step is to upgrade Ubuntu to version 11…. when I feel a bit more game.