This is exciting:

The Computer that is supposed to be the workhorse for my darling significant other is finally finished: an Athlon 1800XP with 256 MB's and some old hardware that I had in my cupboard. Cost?

  • 150 NZ Dollars for the Motherboard and the Processor,
  • 100 NZ Dollars for the Ram
  • 20 NZ Dollars for a 6 GB HD
  • 35 NZ Dollars for a Case with Keyboard.

Most of these items were ordered used from trademe so I only paid 305 Dollars = 100 Euro for a nice machine. I still had a vintage Trident TGUI 9660 on a pile of old hardware, so I don't even need a new graphic card. Unfortunately I was not clever enough to plug in all cables the right side, so I had to ask the local computer whiz to have a look at the machine and why it wasn't booting: turned out that the cable to the primary hd was the wrong way around. Duh!

Well, now it's booting up, and as I had a Knoppix CD in my luggage, everything was a doddle from there. I am still amazed that this distribution just works: you stick it into the cd-rom and that's it. No configuration needed. A blessing.

At this very moment the computer (as yet unnamed) is compiling the second stage of Gentoo, which I deceided to give a trial run. It's modular, fast and in the process of installing I learned plenty about Linux.

If I don't like the results or I get stuck, it's back to good old OpenBSD, as Theo and the guys just released version 3.5. Installing OpenBSD over the internet beats even Knoppix...

I feel so l33t ....


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