The right distro for my home server
 

Hello Community!

I am looking for the right distro for my home server!

What it is:

- Asus itx board with Atom 525
- 4 Gigs of Ram
- 2TB Sata HDD
- 2 Gbit lan hangin on 128mbit cable internet connect

What is has to do:

- Store my Media
- providing Samba Share
- providing Videostreming (good expirience with minidlna)
- maybe some torrentclient/server
- Teamspeak server
- Wlan Router (hostapd)

I tested allready several distros but i allways were bloated with tons of Packages i never need.
I mean, when iam doing a minimal Debian Install, why the hell it bloats the Harddisk with 700mbs of data??
Also when i run top right after installation its full with tons of tasks all these kernelhelpers workers and stuff.

Has anyone of you ever get the whole top output in sight of your screen? It never will fit there, i tried on my 30" Dell in pivot mode :]]. 2560 pixel are not enough ^^

I am looking for a clean distro. An distro like OpenWRT would be nice! Small, Stable, Clean and useable.
Openwrt doesent fit my needs cause there is no clean dualcore support and no sata support for the Harddisk for example.
Selfcompiling is not possible, cause there is no native Compiler inside OpenWRT cause its basicly designed for wlanrouters

There is no graphical frontend needed. Everything will be done through ssh.

I allready tried:
Archlinux, ubuntu, debian, opensuse, gentoo, chaoslinux
and some others i dont remember ^^

Thanks for Your suggestions!
derdigge

Debian does indeed install a lot of stuff. Its "minimal" install is minimal compared to its full install. (Actually, though, I use Debian for my own home server, though I do use the GUI from time-to-time (I'm actually using it right now for LQ while I watch an episode of the Batman TV series on the computer next to it.)

I would suggest taking a look at these two:

Slackware without the X and KDE packages (you can deselect them at time of install--see the README).

Arch--build it to your own specs.

CentOS server install--it doesn't install a GUI.

Thank you for you post!
I will try them tommorrow!

Can someone tell me, why is there so much "noise"
inside top? I mean 79 sleeping processes?

derdigge

Debian net-install is fairly minimal and shouldn't install 700 MB of stuff. Did you install from the net-install CD?

http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/#netinst-stable

You can install a system without a GUI in Debian. Net-install gives you a base system on top of which you can add anything you require (just clarifying)

Otherwise I suggest Slackware without the X server/X apps and KDE related packages. It's more stable than a rolling distribution like Arch which might not be suitable for a server-type system.

Thanks for your Suggestions!
I tested Debian-Netinstall today.
I deselected everything possible during install.
There is no gui or anything.

Result:
Discusage after install 771M !
53 Running processes 63M Ram usage! (ramusage is ok, but 53 tasks up ?? WTF?)

I will try Slackware during the next hours.

derdigge

I'm not sure how much smaller you're going to get and have full functionality. Turn-Key Linux (minimal Ubuntu LTS) Fileserver (Apache, PHP, Webmin, Samba, etc.) with all current updates is about 760MB. They have a smaller version called 'JeOS' (Just Enough OS) that is pretty much the minimum to boot and function under this sort of configuration - not sure how small of an install it is, though. Smaller distros generally give up something along the way to achieve the space savings. As for the processes... at least on my systems, most of them are sleeping and taking up minimal resources, so it's not as bad as you make it sound.

FreeNAS (BSD based) is pretty thin, and provides a very functional home file server that can run from a USB stick, CD, or compact flash card.

Honestly, though... with multi-gigabyte usb sticks and multi-terabyte drives in RAID arrays... quibbling over the OS install using a few hundred megabytes seems like time that might be better spent elsewhere. I know I kind of went thru the same phase, trying to see how lean I could get a given install (Virtualbox is an absolute god-send tor this kind of testing) - until I realized I was probably wasting my time, given the bigger picture. Nothing wrong with pursuing it... I remember being pretty happy with FreeSCO (router/gateway distro that booted/ran from a single 1.44MB floppy disk) back in the day, and kind of wish things hadn't gotten so complicated/bloated since then...

Monte

Thanks for all your Suggestions!
Finaly i took a Jeos of Ubuntu Server.
Its abaut 380m of diskusage and has 58M memory footprint.

After Installation i took a full packagelist, still there are stupid things.
I found Bluetooth drivers/tools, Cd Writer and stuff. After removing all the stupid things
by my self using apt-get the diskusage is down to 240M!

In addition i strapped down the inittab. I took out things i never will need.
There was 6 instances of Getty for example.(i allways will use ssh)
I straped down to 59 tasks running and 47M memory footprint. (including kerneltasks)

I am still thinking it could be better but its enough for now!

derdigge

Well... if you *really* want control over what is installed and what is running... have you considered Linux From Scratch, where you build the system from the ground up yourself? Its not necessarily the smallest around, but you'd have total control over what is and isn't on there.

240mb of hard drive storage is worth less than a dollar these days.
Don't be so quick to criticize the developers of these distros. They know what they're doing and have provided sane base configurations that will run on the vast majority of modern hardware. Deaf people don't need radios in their cars, but that doesn't mean that ripping the dash open and removing the radio will make the car drive any faster...