Any Linux gurus in the house? Getting into it a bit to build myself a NAS and am very frustrated with the video setup. Stupid box keeps limiting my video cards to 800x600 which prevents half the screens from working since you can't get to the buttons at the bottom. Apparently Ubuntu (at least 9.1 and the variants such as kubuntu and xubuntu) did away with the config so I can't even edit that to get higher resolutions (the card is old but capable of 1280x1024). I've tried 3 different old ass cards and all do the same thing... ugh. Just want a fast, reliable NAS. (Speeds in Ubuntu are good, FreeNAS and OpenFiler speeds were garbage by comparison) Thoughts?

I have to say I'm not a fan of Ubuntu

I have been using OpenSuSE 11 for the last little bit and it runs pretty good on my laptop (Intel video card).

You might even try Damn Small Linux (never used it but for a really lite distro, I've heard its pretty good)

As far as the video you are running. ATI, NVidia, Intel??

ATI - Supposedly not as good of driver support (can't say though cos it works fine on my Media Center.)

NVidia - Drivers not included with most distros cos they are proprietary drivers (kinda goes against the free and open source concept - but you can download and install them after the fact and you will be fine after that)

Intel - Haven't had any issues on the laptop with G945 chipset, although its been said that they have issues with 3-d rendering

see if this helps
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/video.html

I went with Xubuntu part for the ease and part for the speed. Is there a precomiled dummy install for OpenSuSE somewhere by chance? I'm just looking for this to be a NAS more or less and running this way killed the speeds of FreeNAS and OpenFiler, etc. I've got mostly older video cards because the box is just a NAS and I am using the PCI-X slot for my hardware raid card. I've tried old Trident cards, S3 Virge DX, couple other old ones. Problem with Ubuntu is they got rid of the config in the latest version due to "auto config" and the auto sucks. I'm a linux tard but if OpenSuSE has a dumbed down gui I could try I'm game, still experimenting at this point and trying to max my speeds to/from the box.

Grabbing the big ole DVD from their site now... have you messed with x64 vs x86 much yet? Was planning to go x64 but doesn't really matter I guess since it's just a NAS but alot of my other boxes are now x64 based. Gonna give it a shot and see how it goes. Got a recommendation for gnome vs kde vs ??? for a clean/functional/fast gui?

As for installation its pretty painless and not much different then ubuntu. http://www.linuxcritic.com/stories/33-OpenSUSE-11.2-Review-and-Commentary.html

One thing thats nice with the opensuse partitioning is you have 'root', 'swap' and 'home', if you decide to install a different version of linux it should only change the root partition. so all your data/settings on 'home' should still be there.

I am using the x86 (32bit) version. On my laptop it boots in about 45 seconds. As for x86 vs x64 its only relevent to the system its installed on, the others have no barring on it.

In the past have used gnome but currently am using kde. but if this system is basically going to be a headless unit and your worried about specs you could go with XFCE (which is what xbuntu used) or Fluxbox for the desktop enviro which are a little more light weight. Here is a link to wikipedia for comparisions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment

Thanks!! Gonna install it today. Ever used Webmin by chance? (http://www.webmin.com/demo.html) Might be a decent option to get into make changes but keep the box as minimal as possible...

Probably going back to 32bit as well, crappy 3ware installer for the webmanager (3DM2) doesn't seem to work well in x64 due to no SSL implementation support.

Ugh, now I remember why I didn't get into Linux. Got it installed (even found my video settings correctly and managed to get my 3ware app running!!) but the friggin SAMBA is a PITA. I set up shares in Ubuntu without any issues but I keep getting a damned access denied error from my Win clients when trying to access the share I setup in SUSE. Also, the default user I created doesn't work so I have to log in as root using the password for the user I created... install cd error maybe? Any ideas what I could be doing wrong on the SAMBA front? I just want a friggin share, don't even care about security on it, just for my local network.

what desktop did you install?

http://library.gnome.org/users/user-guide/stable/nautilus-server-connect.html.en

in kde konquerer file manager you can access it from the network icon and type in the address

I don't have kde infront of me know though (I just reinstalled on the wifes laptop after getting a virus - why can't hp release xp video drivers for a vista machine. why does hp limit nvidia from releasing them on their site)


This the guide I used for mapping shares from my xp system so my linux system can access it

http://opensuse.swerdna.org/susesambacifs.html

a ton of guides are on that site too

Thanks. I can view the share but permissions aren't correct (Access denied) I've set the share to allow guest and even tried guest only, with and without specifying allow access and security type=share. Worked fine without issue in the other distros... Installed OpenSUSE 11.2 x86 direct from the website with KDE.

Musta been a bad install. I reformatted and reinstalled and now the user login errors I previously had are gone and I can setup a share without issue. Speeds is the same as Ubuntu but everything else works so that's great. Just gotta reconfigure the 3ware and some other items but so far so good, thanks for the suggestion of the distro, I like this quite a bit!

So the video card issue has been resolved by switching distros?

Also if you have any issues check out the opensuse forums at their website. Most issues can be resolved just be doing alittle reading there.

Got it working, opensuse forums are solid indeed. SAX2 forced to VirgeDX did the trick... gotta play with the refresh rate a bit but at least I have 1024x768 now. 1280 works but is kinda tweaky (due to the hardware I think). W00t!!! All good and working now with excellent speeds across the LAN. Really impressed with this distro.

glad things worked out for you