Five years ago I was using Ubuntu Linux at my job exclusively. After my new Macbook Pro arrived I have switched to OS X exclusively but I still had an old Windows 7 machine at home that was being used more or less as a NAS.
The time finally came to move from from proprietary OS to something free. As I am used to running Debian on the servers, the choice of Linux distribution was simple, Debian Wheezy.
Here are some of the things I had to do to make things work the way I wanted them to.
Graphics
Installation guide for ATI cards is available on Debians Wiki page. For making fonts look nicer check the section on font smoothing that is also available on Debians Wiki page on fonts.
Mounting Windows drives
Since I am still not sure if this switch is going to be a permanent decision I have decided to keep my storage drives on the NTFS file system. Because of this I was forced to enter the root users password every time I wanted to mount them, this was a no go since I wanted to share those drives via NFS to my Mede8er media player.
For this I had to install ntfs-config and ntfs-3g packages.
apt-get install ntfs-config ntfs-3g disk-manager
Running ntfs-config gives you an option to Enable write support for external and internal devices. After checking this options all the drives where available for reading and writing in the /media folder.
Exporting shares via NFS
Since my media player (Mede8er) supports NFS shares I opted to use it instead of Samba. The setup is simple once you get the export options right. To install NFS on the server
apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap
Instead of portmap, rpcbind will be installed but that doesn’t matter.
Edit /etc/exports and add:
/media 10.29.10.0/255.255.255.0(rw,sync,root_squash)
Replace the IP address and netmask with the ones in your network.
Restart NFS with
/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart
Or if NFS is already running you can just run
exportfs -a
On the Mede8er, go to NFS, Add and enter the IP address of your host and “/media” as the folder.
OSX Time Machine backup
Since I still have two Apple machines, the idea is to use this Debian NAS as a Time Machine backup server so I do not have to rely on plugging in the USB hard drive. As far as I can see there are lots on guides on how to accomplish this. I will update this section once I get the time to implement this.
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