My newbie plans for Arch

shadesandcolour · 2012-01-31 14:43:09

Hey guys

Brand new to arch. Let me know if my plans make sense. I've got a 7-8 year old dell laptop that I'm planning on converting into a personal server with arch.
First I want it to keep my Time Machine drive so that my MacBook pro can use it when I'm at home.
I'm also planning on using it as a small media server at first and then scaling it up. I think if I use xbmc then my friends can share music and too with the totem plugin
I don't know if you've heard of spire for jailbroken iPhones but its a Siri port and I'd like to host a server for that, pretty low overhead.
I may use it as a web server for a small blog or not, havent decided
Other than maybe using an external tv tuner and making it a pvr I can't think of something else

Do those sound doable? I'm not afraid of working in the terminal and I like being able to fix my own problems which is why I picked arch.

AsmundEr · 2012-01-31 15:58:45

None of these things should be very hard to do, but as usual with Arch, you will probably have to fiddle with something here and there. Sounds like the media server part is the one that will require the most of your hardware; web servers are extremely lightweight.

I would recommend connecting the laptop to your (presumably Wifi) router using an ethernet cable, not Wifi. That way you'll have enough bandwidth and low enough latency between the laptop and the router, so you can serve media to several other computers at the same time. I'm guessing that the Wifi speed is going to be the bottleneck, so the laptop should be fast enough.

As for the external tv tuner / pvr option, you may find that a 8 year old laptop is a little slow. Especially if you're thinking about HD content. YMMV though, you didn't give us any specs on the machine.

So just go for it, and come back if you run into problems

shadesandcolour · 2012-01-31 16:25:00

Yeah I was planning on putting it right by the router so that the ethernet cord would reach. Also, I assume that the power management options are configurable so that I could figure out a way to keep the system up all the time. Is there also a way to keep the display off so that I could manage it by SSH? If I install Gnome or KDE could I feasibly start x at login but leave the desktop down until i need it over ssh with X forwarding?

lifeafter2am · 2012-01-31 16:29:19

shadesandcolour wrote:

Yeah I was planning on putting it right by the router so that the ethernet cord would reach. Also, I assume that the power management options are configurable so that I could figure out a way to keep the system up all the time. Is there also a way to keep the display off so that I could manage it by SSH? If I install Gnome or KDE could I feasibly start x at login but leave the desktop down until i need it over ssh with X forwarding?

Considering that you said this machine was 8 years old ... I would highly recommend not running any WM if possible. Considering the services you want to run, plus the (probably) low specs of the machine you may run into some issues with both RAM and processor power. If anything you would want to run something light, i.e. not Gnome or KDE.

shadesandcolour · 2012-01-31 16:32:07

lifeafter2am wrote:

shadesandcolour wrote:
Yeah I was planning on putting it right by the router so that the ethernet cord would reach. Also, I assume that the power management options are configurable so that I could figure out a way to keep the system up all the time. Is there also a way to keep the display off so that I could manage it by SSH? If I install Gnome or KDE could I feasibly start x at login but leave the desktop down until i need it over ssh with X forwarding?
Considering that you said this machine was 8 years old ... I would highly recommend not running any WM if possible. Considering the services you want to run, plus the (probably) low specs of the machine you may run into some issues with both RAM and processor power. If anything you would want to run something light, i.e. not Gnome or KDE.

I'll take that advice. The laptop had one of the higher end P4s and probably half a gig of RAM. But even if I don't go with one of the heavier environments, is there some way to do what I said, and only start the WM session on demand but have X running all the time?

lifeafter2am · 2012-01-31 16:53:19

shadesandcolour wrote:

lifeafter2am wrote:
shadesandcolour wrote:
Yeah I was planning on putting it right by the router so that the ethernet cord would reach. Also, I assume that the power management options are configurable so that I could figure out a way to keep the system up all the time. Is there also a way to keep the display off so that I could manage it by SSH? If I install Gnome or KDE could I feasibly start x at login but leave the desktop down until i need it over ssh with X forwarding?
Considering that you said this machine was 8 years old ... I would highly recommend not running any WM if possible. Considering the services you want to run, plus the (probably) low specs of the machine you may run into some issues with both RAM and processor power. If anything you would want to run something light, i.e. not Gnome or KDE.
I'll take that advice. The laptop had one of the higher end P4s and probably half a gig of RAM. But even if I don't go with one of the heavier environments, is there some way to do what I said, and only start the WM session on demand but have X running all the time?

Well I guess I don't understand the point in running an X server but not having a WM running. I would suggest running some tests as well as to RAM consumption for the various WMs. Even a lot of the WMs that use less RAM still take up around 300M-400M which will be close to topping out your system. I use a pretty light tiling WM and even at boot I am up to around 400M. Considering all this it would probably be better to ssh in when you need to and start the X session then, rather than leave it running all the time.

Of course, you are also probably going to be running 32 bit, which should use less RAM in general. I know on my netbook I hover at around 600M, with a few terminals and a single Chromium session running.

Testing and tweaking is going to be key to this me thinks!

karol · 2012-01-31 17:02:15

dwm is a light wm and it (well, dwm + X, urxvtcd, bash, crond etc.) uses 38 MB RAM at the start, but grows to about 100 MB in a day.
I'm using a 7 yo 2 GHz P4 w/ 512 MB RAM as my main box.

Last edited by karol (2012-01-31 17:05:56)

lifeafter2am · 2012-01-31 17:26:56

karol wrote:

dwm is a light wm and it (well, dwm + X, urxvtcd, bash, crond etc.) uses 38 MB RAM at the start, but grows to about 100 MB in a day.
I'm using a 7 yo 2 GHz P4 w/ 512 MB RAM as my main box.

Awesome, thanks Karol! Guess XMonad isn't as light as I thought it was.

AsmundEr · 2012-01-31 18:19:31

With respect to memory usage: Awesome WM currently uses 200 MB when I have no programs open (except a terminal and htop), two hours or so since boot. But then I'm running Readahead, which fetches a lot of extra stuff into memory before I need it. I think it was closer to 100 MB before I installed Readahead. (Netbook with 1.6 GB Ram)

mythus · 2012-01-31 19:25:02

If you must run a WM, I'd suggest looking at JWM. I have found it to be very light, even ligher (in my case) than many tilers out there. Of course, YMMV and all. However, if you are planning to run it as a simple server, why bother with a WM and X? Why not just ssh into it for your needs, or pull up the shell from the laptop itself?

shadesandcolour · 2012-01-31 20:58:13

mythus wrote:

If you must run a WM, I'd suggest looking at JWM. I have found it to be very light, even ligher (in my case) than many tilers out there. Of course, YMMV and all. However, if you are planning to run it as a simple server, why bother with a WM and X? Why not just ssh into it for your needs, or pull up the shell from the laptop itself?

I think that the only reason for me to run a window manager at all would be for media. I might hook it up to the tv and figure out how to stream to as well as from the server. That's why I'd only need to bring the manager up in certai situations but I guess if I leave x down it should be easy to add the WM to xorg and then bring X up when I need them both and bring them down when I dont

rwd · 2012-02-04 16:45:55

Once you have a server you will find new uses for it. You can use it for backups, a personal drop-box kind of service, let it download torrents, run an email server on it etc. You don't need X for that at all. All server apps can be configured on the commandline, and some have a web-client.

Trilby · 2012-02-04 17:34:03

One point to consider is how the mac time-machine drive will be used.

I don't recall the details, but I've learned from experience that linux does not (by default) recognize the type of links that time-machine uses. Accessing files on a time-machine formatted drive can be a real PITA without tools specifically designed to do so. I've only needed a few of my old files so far so I have done everything 'manually'. I'd be quite surprised if there weren't nice tools available for arch and/or linux in general to read a time-machine drive - but you'll need to find those before it will work.

shadesandcolour · 2012-02-04 18:51:29

Trilby wrote:

One point to consider is how the mac time-machine drive will be used.
I don't recall the details, but I've learned from experience that linux does not (by default) recognize the type of links that time-machine uses. Accessing files on a time-machine formatted drive can be a real PITA without tools specifically designed to do so. I've only needed a few of my old files so far so I have done everything 'manually'. I'd be quite surprised if there weren't nice tools available for arch and/or linux in general to read a time-machine drive - but you'll need to find those before it will work.

Well I don't actually need to access the files from arch, I just need the arch machine to host the time machine drive on the network so that I can mount it on my Macbook Pro and back up from there. It's just supposed to be one less step in the backup process.

EDIT: It looks like through a quick google I would just need the netatalk package in order to get AFP working.

Last edited by shadesandcolour (2012-02-04 18:53:32)

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-31 14:43:09

My newbie plans for Arch

#2 2012-01-31 15:58:45

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#3 2012-01-31 16:25:00

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#4 2012-01-31 16:29:19

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#5 2012-01-31 16:32:07

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#6 2012-01-31 16:53:19

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#7 2012-01-31 17:02:15

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#8 2012-01-31 17:26:56

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#9 2012-01-31 18:19:31

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#10 2012-01-31 19:25:02

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#11 2012-01-31 20:58:13

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#12 2012-02-04 16:45:55

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#13 2012-02-04 17:34:03

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

#14 2012-02-04 18:51:29

Re: My newbie plans for Arch

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