I posted a quick note—linux box built—early this morning. Here’s a fuller report.
After scrabbling together the other bits, I bit the bullet and went down to A1 Computer Solutions, cheque book in hand. Michael was very helpful and I came out with: a floppy drive, 48-speed CD-ROM, keyboard [new], mouse [new], 16Mb ATI graphic card, 19-inch Dell/Trintron monitor, floppy cable and two IDE leads—grand total £100.00 exactly.
With a medium-size pile of computer bits in front of me, I feel it’s time to call in help—in circumstances like this the guy to call is tso. While Ceilidh cooked a fantastic tuna, olive and sweetcorn pizza [from scratch] around us, we built the box on the kitchen floor.
The only slight hitch is the mounting plate on the graphics card [a problem to be solved at a later date], but soon fixed with an ATI Mach64 replacement from tso’s box of bits.
Installation of RedHat 9 was trivial and quick and hey presto, by midnight we had a functioning box. The fact that the temporary graphics card only has 1Mb of RAM, means that I’m restricted to 256 colours at 800x600—but hey, the damn thing works!
I I set myself the task. I’ve come in on budget, eleven days ahead of schedule and having gained a lot of faith in my friends. Thanks a lot folks.
roll of honour
tso | aland | bill | chris | bruno
1)SEND ME HOW FLOPPY DISK CONSTRUCTED .
2)HOW STORING IS PERFORMED?