Hello.

The PowerDeveloper community seems to be very active in porting various operating systems to Efica MX. My problem is that I don't know which one to use. So if you have experienced with different OS releases for Efica MX, please consider my use case and share your knowledge.

I'm planning to setup an Efica MX box for long term usage as a small project server. I'll be running mainly SVN and samba from the internal SSD, and making automated backups to an external SD card. There will be only a few users.

The idea is that once the system is installed I can "forget it", but rely on the services it provides. I have chosen Efica MX since it is inexpensive, silent, low power and has no moving parts - ideal for low budget 24/7 usage.

Now I'm looking for an OS that has support for several years, i.e. will have software repositories online and get at least security updates. I'll be mostly using it headless, but I don't mind having a GUI for installation and maintenance.

What OS do you recommend? Any tips for setup?

-Tapani

For long-term stability, I would say Debian is definitely the best choice. The current stable version is Squeeze but the next one, Wheezy, should be coming this summer.

Performance-wise, going with the armhf (hardware floating-point calculations) version of Debian that was released in February, along with the imx repository that was just posted a week or so ago (check the Debian section on this forum).

I'd say, when you install the armhf image, set your repositories to the Wheezy ones, since it's pretty close to being finished. I'm not sure if the Wheezy imx repos are ready yet, but I think they're coming. I guess technically since Wheezy hasn't officially been released yet, you might want to keep an eye on it at first but I think you can generally be pretty confident in it.

If you want to be super-confident, you'll go with Squeeze....but I don't know what the status of the armhf builds for that release is.

Squeeze is armel only. that said if you just want to use it as a server, my headless image should just work. I also have a headless image for wheezy as well. which is armhf.


I have compiled the genesi specific packages for squeeze and they work rather well (better than maverick in fact) I will see if I can get them put into the repo. but I doubt there will be any updates to them. Is anyone using squeeze on the efika as a desktop?

Thank you.

I'm installing debian armhf to SSD right now.