Best Linux distribution for a Mini-ITX server?

Hello All,

I am about to buy a Mini-ITX fanless PC in order to use it as my personal host machine. Apart from the mainboard and some RAM, I will add a 40GB HD and a DVD/CDRW combo.

My intention is to keep it working 24x7 at some corner of my living room, and use it as a web server with Apache + Tomcat (or even probably Tomcat only, at least in the beginning). I may also use it to download some things with Emule. I will not attach any screen or keyboard to it (except for the initial setup process, of course) and would always access it remotely via RealVNC or some other remote console.

My main question is:

- Which is the best Linux distribution for this? I am an advanced Windows XP user but I have very basic skills on Linux, so I would need some simple distribution that does not need the kernel to be recompiled or some other manual installation steps. I would also need some XWindows interface unless I can run that from my remote client.

- My ADSL router works also as a firewall. Are there any security risks if I only open the required ports?

- Is there some freeware XWindows client that I can run from Windows XP, instead of RealVNC, in order to improve the screen refresh speed when I access it remotely?

Thank you very much. I am new to any Linux newsgroups so I don't know if crossposting is not nice... if so, I am sorry, but I really don't know which is the best group to ask this question.

Regards,

Luis.

Fanless is at best the 800Mhz board ! Is this wise ? The 1200Mhz board is much faster....

Emule works (amule works better I find) - remember it hashes the files, this is both an I/O and CPU intensive operation - this sucks on the 800Mhz via boards, Im using one for this at the moment so I know how much it sucks !

No "best"... Im using fedora core 3 on my via machine, Debian would be the "best" choice for performance as its simpler to cut down to the core - but personally I would save some time and go a simpler route.

I am an advanced

All Linux would need some manual steps. If you want a GUI driven solution to do everything you want then best come back in ten years...... Its very unlikely you would need to build a kernel though !

You will need to edit some files for the XVNC server, for amule you would need to build and install wx libs and amule from source.

I would also need some XWindows

With Xvnc server you can use the windows VNC client to connect.

Always a risk, just not a large one.

Forward ports 4660 to 4680 and 36406 in tcp and udp - some of the docs i've read are not complete, it will work with less ports - just much more slowly !

You can run X - but it wont be much faster, the 800Mhz via board its a bit slow for this setup

From windows this works well as an X server.

If you have the time then go for, but only if you want to spend the time.......

Jon

Any Linux distribution is fine for what you want to do. If you have any friends who are Linux users the use what they are using. I use Fedora Core

4, it has everything in it, but so do SUSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu. Which ever distribution you choose I recommend that you put Webmin, on your system. Webmin gives you the ability to administer your system from a browser which is perfect for you because you aren't going to have a local keyboard or display. Also the Webmin admin tools for servers are very easy to use.

On you Windows box install Cygwin,

Cygwin will give you an X server, ssh, tcsh, bash, basically a full *nix environment on your Windows system. When you do the install make sure that you select everything instead of doing the default install. I find there default choices to be inadequate and it's easier to just install the whole thing then to pick and choose.

Should be fine for a web server. I've been running an 800MHz box with 2-3 users with KDE :-(. The processor speed should only be an issue for stuff like audio & video processing.

He also wants to run a donkey client. As I stated the 800Mhz board is painfully slow calculating the file hashes. For example downloading 20GB of data with 600MB per file average - startup time with complete file hashes 1.4Hrs on 800Mhz via, 12mins of 1Ghz athlon T/Bird, its not I/O speed thats the bottleneck its CPU.

Jon

Your requirements are at odds. Assuming this is a VIA mini-itx with integrated C3 processor - the absolute best distro is Gentoo from a stage one install. There is a wiki which details the steps, but it is time consuming and demands attention to detail. Mine took about a week to install. Gentoo will dowload every piece of software as source code and compile it, specifically optimized for your hardware. It is significantly faster than any 'out of the box' distro. It sounds like you're probably not up to that yet, so go to

and do your homework. Also pay attention to the via arena forums. BTW - note that technically, Gentoo meets your requirements, since it would be a kernel (and everything else) compile rather than a recompile.

Security risks are pretty much nil with Linux. I'm running four computers on a DSL connection - up 24/7/365 with no particular precautions. Been doing this for three years with zero malware infectins.

Yes. See Kenton Lee's X/Motif page for a list of X servers for MS. The standard is pretty much Hummingbird's Exceed - but it is quite expensive. There are various products from free to insanely expensive. I favor X manager since it supports multiple X sessions. They have a very good demo version - highly recommended.

I believe there are a couple of companies selling 1ghz fanless systems.

IMHO - for a VIA mini-itx there is a 'best' - Gentoo from stage one. It is significantly faster (being totally optimized for the hardware) than every other distro I have tried - and I've tried a LOT.

I prefer X manager - it works pretty well, allows multiple X sessions, and the eval copy handles my needs.

... snip ...

Then cross-post the original query, but set follow-ups to a single group, where you will monitor the responses. That avoids the interminable threads from hell, gets you the exposure, and is generally manageable and efficient.

--
"If you want to post a followup via groups.google.com, don't use
 the broken "Reply" link at the bottom of the article.  Click on 
 "show options" at the top of the article, then click on the 
 "Reply" at the bottom of the article headers." - Keith Thompson
More details at: 
Also see

Thanks for the reference - I'll see if I can find time to try it out in the near future. It has been several years since I did an exhaustive comparison; at that time, I tried basically everything I could find - mostly those referred from Kenton Lee's X/Motif page. I found that most of the 'free' packages were quite slow - several were Java based.

That doesn't work. One still has to guess which group is most appropriate for the follow-up.

Modern newsreaders handle crossposting fairly elegantly and nobody using one should be troubled by seeing any of the messages more than once, crossposting with a follow-up is comparatively messy as any the answers are liable to end up in a different group from that in which the poster saw the question.

Furthermore, if I see a question that has a follow-up to a group that I don't follow I don't know whether it has already been answered or not; so I run the risk, if I relpy, that I will cause unnecessary duplication (as well as further thread fragmentation).

Crossposting is best avoided, but followups (used this way) are evil.

Cheers, Daniel.

It's Xorg: RedHat and other vendors dumped XFree86 when they got strange with their licensing, and when it became clear that the Xorg developers were actually paying attention to the needs of the users (such as properly supporting the large group of CygWin users by actually accepting patches to make it work there.)

I've had very good success with it: it's fundamentally smaller and friendlier than the commercial X products, and I find that it;s less likely to fail with poorly written X apps. But X was simply not *designed* for fast remote access speeds: stapling the X display system on top of Windows fairly strange system to get a working display is.a hard problem.

Cool. How well does it do weird fonts and displays? The RedHat "systm-config" tools have turned out to be particularly painful.

Crossposting is vastly, vastly preferable to multi-posting. The burden on the clients and on the servers to handle 5 or 15 copies of the same thing, and the followups, is vastly lighter than doing so with multi-posts, especially because a good early answer from one of the more technically savvy groups can eliminate a lot of unnecessary traffic in other newsgroups, and wherever the question was asked can see that it was answered or followed up to the other groups.

Agreed. I don't advocate multi-posting at all.

My point was that a followup is set on a crossposted message that immediately breaks the threading. People will see the original message in several groups but (unless they follow the followup group) they won't see the replies, so they there may be lots of duplicated replies from people who all assume that theirs is the first answer.

Other people who notice that followups have been set and who don't follow the followup group will decide that checking to see whether there has been a reply is too much trouble, and will refrain from making replying at all, which means, possibly, that the OP will never get a reply from the one person who knew the answer.

People who *do* follow the followup group, and who use a newsreader smart enough not to download multiple copies of crossposted messages, may find that they see the start of the thread in one group and the rest of it in the followup group. This breaks up the discussion unnecessarily and inconveniences the very people who least deserve to be inconvenienced: those who are using decent software!

[Note: the only case in which this does not happen is that in which the followup group is the the first in which the newsreader encounters the message -- newsreaders usually progress through groups in alphabetic order (should we therefore set followops on the basis of alphabetic precedence rather that appropriateness of topic?)]

.. and, of course, some people will inevitably ignore the followup and continue to cross-post ...

If a posting is truly relevant in several groups it is proper that it should be crossposted to all of those groups AND that the ensuing discussion should be accessible though all of those groups. Setting a followup to just one of the groups effectively denies participation to those who who not regularly read the followup group. At one time usenet was small enough that people might have been able to follow every group, but those days are long gone.

I would use a followup to move a discussion from one group in which it has drifted off-topic to a more appropriate group, but not for any other reason (unless I had good reason to believe that everyone reding either group actually read both ... but that cannot be assumed in general).

[Sorry, this sounds like a rant -- I meant to be brief.]

Cheers, Daniel.

... snip ...

In this best of all possible worlds, Cunegonda, that would all work. But in practice threads drift without subjects being revised and marked "was..", trolls attack from multiple groups instead of just one, and the whole thread becomes an impossible nuisance.

I recently (March 6th) failed to set follow-ups on a thread I created in c.a.e, c.l.c, and c.p. It has drifted widely, yet the subject line is still there. Luckily, it has not filled with trolls, but the time will surely come. I should have followed my own advice, but I felt that the subject was of continuing interest in all three groups. In that I was correct, but in failing to set follow-ups immediately I was wrong.

--
Read about the Sony stealthware that is a security leak, phones 
home, and is generally illegal in most parts of the world.  Also 
the apparent connivance of the various security software firms.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_rootk.html

My contention is that even in the flawed world in which we live it is better than the alternatives.

True, and unfortunate -- and point taken! Note, though, that most decent newsreaders will (or at least can) follow threads by message ID rather than subject so while a change of subject is helpful it won't prevent automatic collection of drifted messages.

Besides, some of the most useful and interesting things I've learned on usenet have been from postings that had *nothing* to do with the original thread subject. Drift isn't necessarily bad.

Troll will do as trolls will do -- and that includes ignoring a followup that someone else has set. I don't thing that should be allowed to affect the behaviour of the rest of us.

If the subject really was of sufficient interest to warrant crossposting it in the first place than I would say that it deserved to continue to live in all three so that all who saw the original posting could continue to benefit from the discussion -- remember that some of them may not subscribe to the followup group you might have set and would probably not bother to go there just to follow one interesting thread.

.. but here I am rabbitting on again. Apologies.

Cheers, Daniel.

... snip ...

If they choose not to go to the follow-up group, that is their choice. However if their group is inundated with off-topic postings originating in the other groups, that is not their fault, and they should not be burdened with it.

--
 Some informative links:
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   http://www.geocities.com/nnqweb/
   http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
   http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html
   http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html