New to Linux

[camperdownfamily]

I would class myself as IT literate, having built a number of PC's and a couple of servers over the years, and managed to keep them running without too many problems.  My problem is I have come up through DOS 3.1 / Windows (numerous flavours) / Windows Server / Windows Home Server and I have never touched Linux in any of its flavours.

We use a Linux based Asterisk PBX at work, and I was considering putting that in at home, but reading up on it I discovered a link to LinuxMCE!

My Windows Home Server is the old version and I was thinking of upgrading it anyway, but if moving to LinuxMCE gives me a PBX, plus homeserver functionality plus security functionality in one box - then it sounds to me like the perfect solution.

My question is, for someone who has never touched Linux, what's the best way to get started, how should I set about learning how to configure / administer it / do I even need to, or will LinuxMCE install automatically and then I just use the graphical UI and don't need to worry about the command line?

One other question, my children save all their homework to our Homeserver and it then gets backed up everynight to a cloud based backup - does LinuxMCE also work as a network fileserver and are there any backup packages (I use Cloudberry backup on the Homeserver) that will back up the server?

Thank you

[Marie.O]

At the moment there are no backup facilities build into LinuxMCE, but it does act as fileserver for Windows (and MacOSX, and DOS, and Unix) users

[WhateverFits]

The vast majority of things don't ever need the command-line. When things go sideways, command-line is the way to go. LinuxMCE is an entire bundle and it all installs beautifully, easily, etc. but some of the config can be a little daunting because it is such a huge system. Get yourself a good book (O'Reilly) or online tutorial. Linux is actually easier to administer than Windows in many areas. Scripting is a powerful solution to most problems. Embrace the command-line.  That being said, the vast majority of configuration in LinuxMCE is in a web page.

You can install your own backup system. I don't have any recommendations right now. I just periodically copy everything I need to a separate drive. There are tools that will backup to the cloud. A quick Google found tons including http://duplicity.nongnu.org/index.html

[Techstyle]

I have been sending some of my stuff to my ftp site using duplicity.  here is an example of the contents of a file called backup.sh i created:

Code: [Select]

# help for this file can be found in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DuplicityBackupHowto
export PASSPHRASE=somethinghard
export FTP_PASSWORD=somethinghard
# Check to see if we're at the first of the month.
# If we are on the 1st day of the month, then run
# a full backup.  If not, then run an incremental
# backup.
if [ $date = 01 ]
then
        duplicity full /home/public/data/pictures/931.51\ GB\ \(sda1\)\ SAMSUNG_HD103\ \[39\]/ ftp://myftplogin/photos #>>/var/log/duplicity/photos.log
else
        duplicity /home/public/data/pictures/931.51\ GB\ \(sda1\)\ SAMSUNG_HD103\ \[39\]/ ftp://myftplogin/photos #>>/var/log/duplicity/photos.log
fi
# Check http://www.nongnu.org/duplicity/duplicity.1.html
# for all the options available for Duplicity.

# Deleting old backups
  duplicity remove-older-than 2M --force ftp://myftplogin/photos #>>/var/log/duplicity/photos.log
# Unsetting the confidential variables so they are
# gone for sure.
unset PASSPHRASE
unset FTP_PASSWORD
set PASSPHRASE and FTP_PASSWORD to something hard, I have used "somethinghard" in this example.  also replace the mtplogin with yours also. 

[WhateverFits]

I started playing with Duplicity and, with very little work, I now have my systems backing up to Amazon S3 services. Create a .boto file in your home folder with the credentials stored in it:

Code: [Select]

[Credentials]
aws_access_key_id=
aws_secret_access_key=

and then run Duplicity:

Code: [Select]

duplicity --exclude /mnt/device/72/user_1/incoming/ --exclude /mnt/device/72/user_1/data/ --s3-use-new-style --volsize=25 /mnt/device/72/user_1/ s3+http://some_bucket/some_folder --no-encryption --verbosity=9 --gpg-options=--no-use-agent
This creates 25MB tgz files on the S3 server and works rather well. Once there, you will want to set up Glacier to move your files so that you get charged the really cheap price of Glacier.

[purps]

My question is, for someone who has never touched Linux, what's the best way to get started, how should I set about learning how to configure / administer it / do I even need to, or will LinuxMCE install automatically and then I just use the graphical UI and don't need to worry about the command line?

For me, installing a debian-based desktop for every day use and forcing yourself to use the command line was a good way to get the necessary experience. No you shouldn't need to use the command line, but it is very handy in order to get the most out of it.

LMCE is built on Kubuntu, so anything that you can do with Kubuntu (for example, running a cronjob to rsync something from here to there, or syncing with the cloud) can be done with LMCE.

Cheers,
Matt.