In May this year my trusty PowerMac 5500/275’s power supply died. At £115 for a replacement, it didn’t make sense to spend that much money to repair a machine that’s only worth £250–300 overall.
Friends have helped me out—manDA has lent me her [second gen] iBook and Claire her Titanium G4 at various times. Love and thanks to you both.
But the fact remains that the most powerful computer in the house is now my daughter’s PM 7600/132. Now this is a great machine [as was the 5500], but there’s no way to run Mac OS X on it. Having a G4 Dual 1.25GHz at work now I’m very spoilt and a lot of the things I now do are based on the unix underpinnings of OS X.
So I need another machine. I whip out my no limit platinum credit card… Meanwhile back in the real world: I can’t afford a new Mac, no way no how. Second-hand Macs hold their price very well, so they are really out of my price range—I can’t come up with £400–500 straight off.
In an email conversation with aland he mentioned how little money was spent on building some very servicable BITPart machines for Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival.
So I’m thinking I’m going to build a Linux machine for home for as little money as possible. The task: an up and running Mandrake Linux 9.1 box by 01 September 2003 for less than £100. I’m looking for bits people!
I’ll let you know how it goes.
posted by pault at 12:20, 05 August 2003 | community , linux , macMandy 9.2’ll be out by September.
posted by aed at 00:10, 06 August 2003http://www3.mandrakelinux.com/en/92beta.php3
posted by aed at 00:12, 06 August 2003why mandrake ???
i suppose “why not?” is a good question but i prefer redhat myself - for, no doubt, irrational reasons.
i’m big fan of debian (http://www.debian.org/) too.
you _might_ be able to scrounge some bits from james at www.lowtech.org but unlikely - he’s a big fan of mandrake too, however.
posted by bill at 14:13, 07 August 2003