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light OS for FTP/SMB VM?

VioDuskar
By VioDuskar
in Servers, NAS, and Home Lab
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i'm looking for a user friendly OS to turn into a VM on my ProxMox server.


I would like a GUI 

I would like to set up FTP and SMB on the same disk. (as it's a virtual disk, already in a raid)

a little background:
I currently have a trueNAS machine doing some FTP and SMB services for me, however, I cannot cluster with TrueNAS, and I would very much like to.

I have two server chassis with hardware in them, and I plan to use the new one to set up ProxMox, migrate all of my TrueNAS data over, then wipe the old chassis and add it to the ProxMox cluster as a secondary node. 

 

I plan to set up a new VM to replace TrueNAS's functions, but I don't know what to pick. 
I know that pretty much any OS can run SMB and FTP services, but I also want to setup a plex service that pulls it's content from the NAS data. 


TL:DR; 
Need light GUI OS that can run SMB, FTP, and Plex services.  please suggest.

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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48 minutes ago, VioDuskar said:

i'm looking for a user friendly OS to turn into a VM on my ProxMox server.


I would like a GUI 

I would like to set up FTP and SMB on the same disk. (as it's a virtual disk, already in a raid)

a little background:
I currently have a trueNAS machine doing some FTP and SMB services for me, however, I cannot cluster with TrueNAS, and I would very much like to.

I have two server chassis with hardware in them, and I plan to use the new one to set up ProxMox, migrate all of my TrueNAS data over, then wipe the old chassis and add it to the ProxMox cluster as a secondary node. 

 

I plan to set up a new VM to replace TrueNAS's functions, but I don't know what to pick. 
I know that pretty much any OS can run SMB and FTP services, but I also want to setup a plex service that pulls it's content from the NAS data. 


TL:DR; 
Need light GUI OS that can run SMB, FTP, and Plex services.  please suggest.

“Light weight” and “user friendly” tend to be both subjective and mutually exclusive.  With no cutoffs for “not user friendly enough or how light weight you want it’s pretty difficult.  There are more linuxes out than BSDs atm.  BSDs tend to have the most lightweight distros, but such distros also tend to be less user friendly so possibly not even an option.   Which distro though I don’t know.  Something KDE rather than GNOME most likely. KDE is a lighter weight GUI. Resembles ‘98 a bit.  Or used to. It has the advantage of a lot of development which other GUIs lighter weight than GNOME probably don’t have. It itself may be too far down the lack of user friendliness path though so it’s just hard to make a call.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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19 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

“Light weight” and “user friendly” tend to be both subjective and mutually exclusive.  With no cutoffs for “not user friendly enough or how light weight you want it’s pretty difficult.  There are more linuxes out than BSDs atm.  BSDs tend to have the most lightweight distros, but such distros also tend to be less user friendly so possibly not even an option.   Which distro though I don’t know.  Something KDE rather than GNOME most likely. KDE is a lighter weight GUI. Resembles ‘98 a bit.  Or used to. It has the advantage of a lot of development which other GUIs lighter weight than GNOME probably don’t have. It itself may be too far down the lack of user friendliness path though so it’s just hard to make a call.

I prefer a GUI, but I'm not against a little command line, I just don't want to do EVERYTHING in CLI. I don't care if it resembles '98 as long as the interface is easy to get setup. i'm probably only going to look at it once every blue moon. 
 
I should clarify I mean light on the disk size, not CPU usage or RAM, I have plenty of that. 

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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10 minutes ago, VioDuskar said:

I prefer a GUI, but I'm not against a little command line, I just don't want to do EVERYTHING in CLI. I don't care if it resembles '98 as long as the interface is easy to get setup. i'm probably only going to look at it once every blue moon. 
 
I should clarify I mean light on the disk size, not CPU usage or RAM, I have plenty of that. 

The lightweight stuff is usually light on everything.  They’re generally designed for older hardware.  XUbuntu is listing 8gb minimum, 20gb preferred. Only hard numbers I seem to be able to easily find.  It’s apparently more processor intensive than some. Uses xfce interface.  There are BSDs made to run on Pis though. It seems you don’t want a lightweight OS so much as a small footprint OS.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The lightweight stuff is usually light on everything.  They’re generally designed for older hardware.  XUbuntu is listing 8gb minimum, 20gb preferred. Only hard numbers I seem to be able to easily find.  It’s apparently more processor intensive than some. Uses xfce interface.  There are BSDs made to run on Pis though. It seems you don’t want a lightweight OS so much as a small footprint OS.

i suppose that's a better way to phrase it, but I also just need the file hosting features, not much else. 

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How about turnkey linux? They have a version that is a pretty simple smb server, and has a good web gui for controlling it.

heck, that looks perfect. i'll give it a shot!

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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I have had good experiences with OpenMediaVault, it will run on anything pentium 4 prescott 64 bit as well as athlon 64 or newer no problem, it will even run on things like raspberry pi's and is used by odroid in their HC series of nas SBC's

this video by explainingcomputers.com shows how to set it up on a raspberry pi, but the process is similar for most systems, being x86_64, arm or anything.

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