Linux OS decision

[Riotvan]

The same theory that drove GM in the 80's ...

Good thing that Arch only costs you time then

Sorry, should have been clearer -- my friend is extremely tech savvy -- writes drivers, kernel mods, etc. But all experience is in Windows, wants to learn other OSsesses. Doesn't need to learn system administration, wants everything out of the way as much as possible, he knows how to dive under the hood. So it's not so much handheld that he wants as requires very little maintenance.

Ah right. Yeah i can understand that, it's the same reason i switched to Fedora on my "critical" systems.

[CarlSeibert]

Another update:

I'm ditching my ancient tape drive.

For the small server share that holds really important stuff and needs daily backup, I'm trying this outfit:

https://www.jungledi...group/features/

So far so good. The client runs fine on Fedora. It emails me spiffy run reports,and takes pretty close to zero effort.

I'll pair the cloud backup with some sort of disk-based scheme for weeklies of the bigger datasets. At the moment, I think I'll try this:

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

[mypasswordis]

I'm about to receive the Raspberry Pi I ordered. First OS I'll try is of course Raspbian, and learn Python while I'm at it. Seems GPIO is limited, there are only 8 pins and only one of them can support hardware PWM. Will probably end up using my other ARM development board for hardware prototyping and control, but definitely interested to see what the large and enthusiastic RPi community comes up with in the meanwhile.