thelinuxlink.net

I've seen a few people ask about linux on this puppy but I haven't seen anyone else try it. After looking at the hardware, I decided it was all fairly common PC stuff and it should probably run linux just fine. I think the MediaSmart is a very capable box as is, but I'm more familiar with linux server environments and just wanted to try it. I also wanted to see if the amazing throughput this thing achieves was something I could get in linux, and I wanted RAID5.

In summary, I was able to boot linux on the server, but I wasn't able to do anything useful with it (yet). I experienced two major hang-ups along the way.

First, here's how I did it. Nothing too terribly fancy. I simply installed Ubuntu Gutsy on a SATA HDD using a spare PC. Once the OS was installed, I installed an ssh server (sudo apt-get install ssh). I wasn't sure I wanted X to try and run so I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst by changing the "splash" kernel option to "nosplash". I also removed references to /etc/init.d/gdm in the rc*.d folders to stop gdm/gnome from running. The update-rc.d command did this neatly. I also changed the power management settings so that the system would power down when I pressed the power button. This was done from the Power Management window because I don't know how to do this on the command line. Finally, I created a script to print the output of a few useful utilities (like lspci) to a file and added it to rc.local.

I'm writing this from memory so I may have forgot a couple of steps I took notes but they're at work next to the server. This is an after work but at work project.

I power-cycled the spare machine and made sure everything worked the way I wanted it to. Then I powered down the MediaSmart server, removed the existing Windows drive and replaced it with the linux drive. I pressed the power button and listened. To my surprise, it actually sounded like the thing was booting. I was pretty excited at this point. I tried to find the machine on the network, but no luck. So I powered down the server, removed the drive, and examined its contents on the spare machine.

The script I created did actually run on the server, so I have the output of the utilities I specified in the script and verified that the thing actually booted. Two major problems: first is that ethernet didn't work. lspci shows that the ethernet adapter is a SiS191. I'm hoping the information here: http://www.howtoforge.com/creating-the- ... -linux-2.6
will fix this issue.

The second issue is that the boot loader gets overwritten. I tried booting from the spare PC after the drive ran in the server and it didn't work. I'm guessing this is some kind of fail-safe feature of the hardware/BIOS. I'd like to try storing the known good MBR somewhere on the file system, then check the existing MBR and overwrite it if it has changed. Another rc.local entry and some dd action should take care of this (assuming the change happens at startup).

I'm going to try getting a fully functional system, so I'll post updates as I make more progress.

If you try this - good luck!

PS - The server booted the original Windows install just fine after I stuck
the original drive back in.