More specialty Linuxes to the rescue

“OpenFiler
OpenFiler is a SAN/NAS appliance based on rPath Linux. According to
its creator, OpenFiler actually began life atop Fedora Linux, moved
to CentOS, and final settled on rPath, attracted by that Linux’s
impressive package-management environment. OpenFiler can operate at
either the SAN or NAS level — or both simultaneously.

“OpenFiler’s feature set is impressive. It provides drivers for
a wide array of peripheral busses: It can talk to disk drives on
IDE, SAS, SATA, SCSI, or iSCSI interfaces. If you need RAID,
OpenFiler is compatible with hardware from Adaptec, LSI Logic,
Intel, and others. Further, it can handle file systems up to 60TB
in size. Its supported Ethernet controllers include Fast, Gigabit,
and 10 Gigabit controllers from Intel and Broadcom. In spite of
these bounteous capabilities, its actual processor and memory
requirements are modest. A standard x86 system with 256MB of RAM,
1GB of disk space for the OS image, and at least one Ethernet card
is all you need to get going.

“Ubuntu Studio
Ubuntu Studio targets three broad categories of media support:
audio, graphics, and video. During the installation of the system,
you choose one or more of those three categories. So, for example,
you could have an installation of Ubuntu Studio geared solely to
audio — the configuration I chose — or you could install a mixed
audio/video workstation.”

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