Advice on Linux

So I’m going to take the plunge and install Linux on my home machine. I picked Gentoo, and will go forward with it unless someone can reason me to another flavor.

My first question is this: I have 2 250 GB SATA drives on a Promise SATA controller. I can RAID them using the controller, but I’ve read that I might be better off RAIDing them using Linux RAID.

Any suggestions, hints, ideas?

So I’m going to take the plunge and install Linux on my home machine. I picked Gentoo, and will go forward with it unless someone can reason me to another flavor.

My first question is this: I have 2 250 GB SATA drives on a Promise SATA controller. I can RAID them using the controller, but I’ve read that I might be better off RAIDing them using Linux RAID.

Any suggestions, hints, ideas?

Thanks Weed

6 thoughts on “Advice on Linux”

  1. Ubuntu

    If this is truly your very first foray into Linux-Land, don’t do Gentoo. Do that when you’re feeling a bit more hard-core and interested in just geeking out.

    Install Ubuntu instead. It comes on a single CD, and you don’t even need to install it. You can just run from the CD, and it can write files to your hard drive (even if it is NTFS). It’s just a much more pleasant introduction to Linux.

    Once you’ve done that, revisit this thread and I’ll geek out with you 🙂 As far as hardware or software RAID, I’ll pick hardware every time over software for simplicity and ease of management. Yes, Linux RAID is, in most cases, MUCH faster than hardware RAID cards.

    But if one of your mirrored drives break, or if you have to fail over to a hot-spare from your pool in a RAID 5 array, hardware management is light-years ahead in terms of ease of transitioning data. Go hardware if you can.

    If it’s one of those Promise deals which requires a special RAID driver be loaded by the operating system, then it’s one of those hybrid RAIDs which doesn’t have everything implemented in hardware. In that case, the “least management headache” marker leans towards using Linux’s built-in “md” (multiple disk) driver. Those types of hybrid cards often use buggy, proprietary drivers which require non-standard commands to manipulate the array.

    According to my co-workers, I’ve transitioned into “guru” status due to having used Linux for more than a decade. So if you have Linux questions, I almost certainly have answers! Though not necessarily good ones 🙂 They often involve a lot of explanation of “well, I do it this way because it works across these five different operating systems and thus is easier to remember”…

    —
    Matthew P. Barnson

    1. linux

      I to have taken the dive into the world of linux, and have chosen pclinuxos for my dive. So far so good, tho I cannot seem to figure out how to install any applications, nor can I get my lexmark z45 to work, but I like the os, it is fast and no crashes yet.

    2. Server vs Desktop

      Knowing full well I want to evetually play with Drupal and other CMSs, should I install Desktop or Server edition?

      Thank Weed

      1. Doesn’t matter

        It really doesn’t matter. They’re the same product, but with a different set of base applications installed. You’d just want to use Synaptic to install apache2, php, and MySQL with the desktop; I think the server already has it installed.

        —
        Matthew P. Barnson

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