Since it’s time to plan for a probable addition to my LAN this December/January I want to start planning now.
I have my brothers old Dell 4500 PC on hand, well what is left of it hehe. The Pentium 4 is still there, which should be a Northwood core @ 2.0Ghz but it could possibly be a Willamette with a slower clock-speed, only a successful boot will tell.
Before I can boot her, I need some RAM. So the plan is to buy Ma a pair of 512MB (total 1GB) chips for her PC. And to take her old 2x256MB (total 512MB) for this salvage operation. The PC’s are very close models and as far as I can tell the Mother Boards are the same chipset and as much research as I’ve had time to do shows that I shouldn’t run into an problems here.
The box also needs a Networking card, because even if there was a way to get two 56K Winmodems chained together, I wouldn’t want to LOL. I’m figuring that I’ll try to buy a Wireless adopter or an Ethernet NIC depending on my final plan. One of these computers, my Desktop (SAL1600), File Server (Vectra), or this Dell 4500 I’m repairing will likely go in my bedroom with a Wifi card. While the other remain/swap into place with its/its swapped Ethernet card.
If I can, I’ll probably leave it on 24/7 as a workstation or use it to transition my File Servers OpenBSD install over to better hardware. If I do make use of it as a Work system, I’d like to run GNU/Linux on it, because most of my experience has been with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The problem with that is there are very few Linux Distros I can stand using…. Ether way I need to start planning and testing for what I’m going to do, and this damn blasted parakeet is not helping with the insensent squaking… After ~8 years or so, you’d think he’d STHU!
The only GNU/Linux distributions that I respect are Debian and Slackware. Debian, can be a bit of a hard case about things but you’ve got to give them credit to sticking to their guns. The differences between Debian’s Iceweasel, Icedove, Iceowl, Iceape and Mozilla’s Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and the communities SeaMonkey come to mind… Slackware, well hehe enough said. The only problem is they are both more trouble then they are worth in this case, I want to get the system set up but without having to screw with it to much along the way.
Other then Debian and Slackware, the only distro to interest me is Gentoo, I think if I ever put the effort into setting it up, Gentoo and I would get along very well. The only problem is I don’t have time to fiddle with it. I would probably have to go with trying a Stage 1 install, and that is a little time consuming… Hehe.
Other Distros that I have considered are Ubuntu, I’ve tested Ubuntu when it was at 6.06 but I don’t care for it. It is a nice system but I don’t really ‘dig’ it. It’s just not my cup of tea, although it’s what I would recommend to users who just want an easy to use OS, without having to learn more then using Synaptic. One of my reasons for FreeBSD, is I wanted to learn about the underlaying system and it’s complexity, not just write an E-Mail without having to tell it my POP3 server (for which no MUA can do, until they invent mind-reading ones). I have no interest in using Ubuntu on this system unless I *have* to.
The install is likely to be a cross between a server and a desktop as far as software goes, it will include X and a proper development environment either way. My OpenBSD box basically only has what it needs to run the services I use it for by comparison.
Two suggestions that came up were PLD Linux and KateOS, both from Poland. PLD looks like a nice system but not my style. I’m not found of the RPM’s either… KateOS on the other hand is based on Slackware. So far it looks like a very nice system to my tastes, my plan is to test it on my desktop (SAL1600). Because I maintain my ‘gaming’ install of WinXP on it along with a dedicated Linux and BSD partition for testing purposes. I might even use KQEMU if it supports DVD ISO’s.
It looks like a good system for me but no one told me that the Polish and US mirrors download at about 20~26kb/sec !!! Since I’d want at least 2 or 3 of the 3 CD sets… I figured I would get the DVD since I don’t want to test the minimal install. There are also 2 ‘extension’ disks, one for GNOME and one for KDE so one can skip installing them over the Internet. It’s looking like an 11 hour download for my initial testing…. Joy.
I need to get to work on the planning for when I’ll need to get the system working, so while KateOS 3.6 downloads I may as well get cracking, current factors are:
location
use/purpose
software
hardware
management
cost
time
I’ve yet to think of any thing else I need to do yet, the biggest issue is going to be location, most importantly what systems physically go where. And which system will be doing what.