To quote David Coverdale "Here I Go Again!"

Click the picture for some classic 1980s rock ballad and insane hairstyles!

Back in January before I split my online ramblings into two distinct blogs I posted about some problems with my main Dell Windows XP box and it's recurrent BSOD problem.

Well last Thursday I found my computer hung up again and after being forced to power it down and rebooting found it extremely sluggish and within a few minutes the familiar "Stop 0x000000F4 BSOD" appeared. Checking the event viewer it was apparent that yet again bad blocks on the hard drive were the problem so I had to run a "chkdsk /r" which this time took the best part of 24 hours!

While it was doing that I decided I would have another look at getting a desktop Linux box running. I was tempted by openSUSE but opted for Fedora8, I have had good experiences with both distributions in the past as opposed to my awful experiences with Ubuntu, I think it may be the hideous brown colour scheme!



My target hardware came courtesy of my neighbour who was disposing of some old pcs. On investigation this old Packard Bell came with a MSI K7TM Pro (MS-6340) motherboard an AMD Athlon 800MHz, 256MB of RAM and NVidia Vanta TNT2 video card and on board sound and a DVD-CD/RW combo drive. I installed a spare 80GB harddrive, boosted the memory to 640MB and stuck in a network card. I upgraded the BIOS (which made a remarkable difference to the options available) and stuck in the Fedora8 Install DVD and off it went.


You can see the Fedora8 running on the left while the XP box on the right struggles to correct itself!

I have been pleasantly surprised how reasonably it runs on relative underpowered hardware and more surprised how much easier I found it to get things running. In the past I have always hardware incompatibility problems, often in the install failing completely, or software problems. So all I have ever done is get a rudimentary server running, mainly so I could use it as a SSH proxy to bypass my previous companies web block and logging! That is not to say I did encounter a few minor problems but they were easily corrected and I will post some of the solutions later.

The machine called "INSANE" is fully integrated into the Windows network, prints and scans using my HP 3210 All-in-one printer/scanner. It plays videos, mp3s and I even compiled the last.fm client!