brentashley

I’ve been saying for ages that Linux will never be ready for prime time until I can take a bare machine, pop the disk in, and have it up and configured pretty well automatically, without partitioning, farting with X parameters, finding drivers, all that.

Well, today I got myself a dedicated box to run Linux on – a used Compaq Deskpro PII-400/6Gig/64Meg/CD/100bT + 128MegSIMM altogether for $375CDN ($250US) from Factory Direct.

Plugged the thing in, connected my monitor, schlepped in my cut-from-downloaded-iso-images Mandrake 8.1 CD #1, and in about a half an hour, I had me a complete Linux server and X workstation running. Auto-detected everything, partitioned itself, the whole whack. Pulled off the monitor, connected by VNC, voila, a headless X server.

Now I got me some serious spelunking to do.