My HDA Project: From the Ground Up -or- How I Did It

[rumblepak]

[quote="flickeringsight"][quote="moredruid"]Your /boot cannot be ext4, grub doesn't have support for the ext4 filesystem yet and grub needs to start its stage 2 from that partition.
You can use ext2/ext3 for the /boot partition, since it won't have many modifications speed and journaling aren't that important.

Thanks Flickeringsight for sharing your experience with us. I'm doing a similar project with a similar setup, I ditched my Windows Home Server due to reliability issues. Now I'm trying Amahi and it is a very steep learning curve as this is my very first experience with Linux.

Moredruid: I'm a bit confused about the quote above as the Fedora 12 release notes says ext4 is supported for the /boot partition:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-n ... ators.html

Anaconda even defaulted /boot to ext4. Ext4 works fine for me, however I also just ran an all updates (304! of them) which also seems to have updated the kernel from 2.6.31.5-127.fc.x86_64 to 2.6.31.9-174.fc.x86_64, however I can only boot the older kernel, the newer kernel gets an "Error 15: file not found". I will need to do some more research on this.

Sorry for all the waffeling and thanks to everyone supporting the foum

[moredruid]

hmm thanks for the info about /boot on ext4. This is a new feature. I'm not sure if it's an experimental feature or considered to be stable (I think the former). I'd still recommend using ext2/3 but hey, I'm a bit conservative in favor of stability (as I should be as a sysadmin).

The large number of updates are normal on a Linux system. Note that you receive updates for all the software that's installed on your system, not only the OS. Especially in newer releases you will find that updates come very often. That's the reason for some to hold an upgrade to the latest version back (I'm running F10) until the next comes out. I do like the setup of Debian best in that regard: either choose the "testing" release or the "stable" release (there is also a bleeding edge "development" release which sometimes seems to have an update every 10 minutes), and if you run a server and need the stability (and not the latest versions) you just run stable.

The fact that your new kernel is not working might be because the image isn't generated properly or damaged. This may be due to several reasons (1 being /boot too small, so you might want to check how much space is available on /boot). If you need to regenerate a kernel image you can use the mkinitrd command, although removing the update and reinstalling it should also work.

[repat]

which also seems to have updated the kernel from 2.6.31.5-127.fc.x86_64 to 2.6.31.9-174.fc.x86_64, however I can only boot the older kernel, the newer kernel gets an "Error 15: file not found". I will need to do some more research on this.

It's been a looong time since I've updated a kernel, but I seem to recall having to rename/move the newly compiled kernel for it to be recognized on boot. Maybe someone with a little more (and current) experience can chime in here.

Pat

[lalpert]

My two cents:

1. I needed to burn the Fedora 12 ISO at 4x or else I got errors. In general, burn all ISOs as slow as you can. The 64bit DVD did not work well so I used the 32bit DVD.

2. Fedora is an unfriendly front end. Due to some philosophical reasons Fedora doesn't want to support MP3 playback. Ubuntu or OpenSUSE make you jump through a small hoop. Fedora makes you navigate an obstacle course to get MP3s to play. It gets irritating. I wish Amahi was on Ubuntu for this reason. It's hard enough to get Amahi set up and working without Fedora creating its own roadblocks.

3. That is a nice case. I just installed my Amahi in an Apex slim case. The Apex case is nice except for the power supply cables.

4. I haven't tried this yet but I'm going to install all my files from a client PC in the hopes that I will be able to delete files off of the hda that way. Right now I installed all my files directly on the hda from an external hard drive and my clients don't have delete capability.

[flickeringsight]

Hi everybody, it's been a while since I posted but there has been progress. Over in the 'Media Server' section I posted my scripts for automatic disc ripping and encoding. They're still very work-in-progress but also usable.

http://forums.amahi.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1459