[Cialug] old laptop as file server

[Kendall Bailey]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:56 AM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org> wrote:
> Possibly. The solution is to get a usb2 cardbus card. They're quite
> cheap. (under $20). With usb2.0 my external hard drive is as fast (or
> faster maybe) than my laptop's built in hdd.
>
> The benefit of using a desktop distro like xubuntu (or etc) is that
> you get good power management support. If you use the alternate
> installer version the latest Ubuntu 8.04.1 should work fine on your
> machine. You can disable gdm so that the desktop environment does not
> load at boot up though for this modest task I doubt it will make much
> diff.
>

Thanks for the input.  I installed the latest Debian testing (lenny
beta2).  I don't have a usb enclosure for the hard drive yet, but I
plugged in a 2GB flash drive and set it up to be shared via Samba.  It
works pretty well so far.  Speed is about 6Mbs from what I measured
over the lan.  I'll think about the usb2.0 card once I have it all set
up.

I don't know much about the power management stuff.  It appears to
turn off the screen and spin down the hard drive when idle, with just
the Debian install.  SSH connections stay alive though.  I think it's
good.

Kendall