New tastes, new flavors

For the past few years I have been using a Debian Linux server on our home network. For the most part, it has functioned with very little intervention. Its primary purpose has been for local backups, which it in turn backs up to the cloud using the excellent Crashplan service, but it also has functioned as a Neorouter server for VPN services and a proxy server (using Privoxy).

I original chose Debian Linux after doing quite a bit of reading online. At the time I was running Windows XP for our server, but the system was showing its age running on Windows (this is a now 10 year old eMachines system!). I settled on Debian as a classic flavor that wasn't too hardcore but would provide a good backbone for a home server environment. At the time, I wanted a primarily GUI environment, and even now I still feel more at home in a GUI, although I am much more comfortable with a command line than I used to be.

In the end, it proved a fairly grueling task to get everything running the way I wanted under Debian. I only had a vague knowledge of permissions and extremely limited understanding of the nix environment. I was able to get everything up and running, but only after a few days of intense focus. The result was a functioning system and a wife rather irritated at being ignored for three days straight.

In hindsight, I think that something even more friendly than Debian would have been a better choice, most likely Ubuntu. I likely would have avoided several of the many issues that I had. But no matter, the system worked and did what I wanted it to.

Well it's now been several years, and the release of Debian that is running on the system is quite out of date. So with our recent move to Boise, I have decided to update the OS, and switch around several other aspects of my network setup. I will be documenting the process in a series of posts. I may not post every step, because I don't want to get bogged down in documentation, but definitely I will post solutions I manage to hit upon when I run into snags.

After looking at the current landscape of Linux flavors, I have decided to stay in somewhat familiar territory by going with some flavor of Ubuntu (Ubuntu grew out of Debian). I have run the stock Ubuntu as a live boot a few times in the past, and the Unity desktop seems OK to me, but I worry that this system will struggle with it. So I was looking for something a little less demanding.

I found a nice comparison of several flavors including Xubuntu and Lubuntu. In the comments, though, someone mentioned Ubuntu Mate, and as I looked at this option I thought it might work well. I also considered Xubuntu, but the thing that eventually turned me off of that was that the stable version is only supported for 3 years, which would put the EOL of the LTS 2014 version in 2017, which just seems to close to me. But Ubuntu Mate has a full 5 years of support for their 2014 version, and 2019 sounds a lot further than 2017. Add that into the low system requirements, and I am sold on it.

So right now I'm imaging the current hard drive using Easeus Todo Backup free version so that I have something to fall back on in case I completely blow this process.

Edit: Well, Easeus was unable to restore the backup it had made, so now I am trying AOMEI Backupper instead.

Edit 2: In the end, I was never able to restore the backup image that I had made. In AOMEI, I kept getting the error

Information Code:214
Not enough reserve space. Please make big enough available space for target partition.

I got something similar when trying to restore using Easeus. I had done a sector by sector backup, because I had both Linux and Windows on the same machine, and the WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment) didn't recognize data in the non-Windows filesystems. Really, there should be no problem, because I am restoring back to the same drive that was imaged, but for some reason it just didn't work to restore. In the process, the drive structure got wiped out, so I just proceeded with the Ubuntu Mate installation. However, that too was fraught with peril...

Next up: Installing Ubuntu Mate

Note: This post is part of a loose series. Go here for a full list of all posts in the series.