TuxRunner

It’s been a while since I’ve posted.  Hasn’t really been anything crazy going on in the world of Linux for me.  But things are starting to pick up again.  I finally, FINALLY got rid of my last Windows system at home!  (Well, not entirely true, I still have an XP VM floating around for a check printing program I use).  My Windows 2003 file server at home has been replaced entirely by a new DroboShare for the Drobo, and any apps that were on it are now running under Linux on my CentOS box.

I also, without giving her much notice, upgraded (haha) the wife from a Windows 7 Release Candidate, to Linux Mint 7 over the weekend.  She’s honestly pretty good with it.  Not too much for her to figure out.  I’m surprised at how well she’s adapting to it.  I’m trying to keep things as familiar as possible to her.  Luckily I’ve had her using a lot of cross-platform apps, so things like Skype, Firefox, and Picasa are already familiar to her on the Linux side. (continue reading…)

Wow, did I have a heck of a time nailing down a solution to get my Drobo to work in Linux and still meet all my requirements.  It previously was on a Windows 2003 server, but since I’m a Unix guy now…that doesn’t make sense anymore.  So I wanted to move it over to Linux, but I had to have a few conditions met:

1. The file system format had to be something that I could easily still move to a Windows box, and plug it in and it would work.  This is just in case my Linux box blows up, and the wife still needs access to the files on her Vista PC.  That limits me to FAT32 nd NTFS.
2. The front lights still need to work.  I’ve read that with EXT3 on the Drobo, it can’t properly evaluate drivespace use.  If you put data on, and the use lights go up…then you delete, the lights don’t change.
3. It needed to be able to be mounted into the filesystem and used with Samba without much difficulty.

(continue reading…)