Am very excited because I’m going to Aktivix this weekend.
Be in no doubt there will be more on this later.
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
It’s early in the morning and I’ll write a longer report tomorrow—but the linux box is built, running RedHat and at a cost of £100.00 exactly.
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.
First of all I came across this item—Self-modifying hardware via distributed genetic algorithms—on the intermittently marvellous Boing Boing.
It interested me enough to look at original website—Distributed Hardware Evolution Project.
Now I’m a fan of distributed computing projects. I’ve been running SETI@home for over four years—here’s my SETI@home stats.
I’m also looking to expand my unix/linux knowledge as I’ve recently got a G4 Dual 1.25GHz as my main machine at work. So in conjunction with the excellent Mac OS X in a Nutshell, I’m taking on little Terminal projects.
I therefore installed the client for this project. Want proof? Look at the stats page.
I’m proud of myself. Having now successfully installed Movable Type and now this, I’m feeling a little more confident in the Terminal.