I haven't been on the forums very much lately. I thought I would share what I have been working on as a side project. I am experimenting with setting up the perfect home server. I am starting off on a basic old pc as a test bed. It is a 1.5ghz P4, 256mb of ram, geforce4, dvd drive, 20gb hdd, Ethernet and wireless. I chose to post about this here as it will be mostly about debian.
I started with the smallest debian image you can get the 40mb one. Most of the packages you download from the net. I did a basic install with no gui or anything. I also asked it to install the "file server option" which installs samba and other associated programs. Once the computer booted I installed ssh so I could manage it remotely and not have a screen and keyboard plugged in.
Last night I decided to have a go at setting up wifi. First I checked to see if my wifi card is supported. To my surprise the drivers where included in the kernel. Next I installed iwconfig for configuration and wpa_supplicant so I can connect and authenticate wpa. After 2 hours of playing around with settings. I managed to get the wireless working.
Next I will setup samba. It appears to be mostly installed I will just have to monkey with the config. For those who don't know samba allows windows pc's to share files with linux pc's and it appears to the windows pc that it is sharing files with another windows pc.
If all this goes to plan. I will scrounge together some computer parts and buy some 1tb hard disks and make a kick ass file server.