Linux Project Computer update

After weeks of working on this machine off and on between other projects, I finally got it running. The hardest part was finding hardware that actually worked, but I guess this was to be expected with hardware from circa 1996. I found a PIII motherboard and processor, but the first power supply I hooked up was apparently bad and fried that motherboard so I changed power supplies and motherboards and it powered up. I checked the BIOS and adjusted all of the settings, took off the zip drive and floppy drives and disabled it in the BIOS. Went to install xubuntu 9.02 on it and found out I had a faulty cd-rom drive, swapped it out with another and tried again. Another faulty cd-rom drive. After 3 tries, I finally successfully installed xubuntu. After installing everything, it seemed to work okay, but it would randomly log me out when I resized windows. I tracked it down to a faulty memory bank in the video card I had installed, so I had to swap that out as well. After that final swap out, everything works perfectly.

Here is what I ended up with:

A Dell custom mother board and 400 mhz PII processor
320 mb of PC-100 SDRAM
13 gig IBM hard drive
ATI 16 mb AGP graphics card
40x cd-rom drive
10/100 ethernet PCI card
200 watt power supply

All in all, this ended up being made up from parts of 5 different computers that didn’t work before and were on their way to be recycled with an OS that was free,  It’s not a speed demon but definitely fast enough for general office work and internet browsing, which is what it will eventually be used for once I get through playing around and learning linux. I learned a lot by putting this together and hope to learn a lot about linux as well.

Xubuntu was definitely a good choice because it requires minimal resources to run, runs pretty fast considering the hardware and is still supported by linux and recent linux apps, unlike if I had chose to install Windows 98 which isn’t supported by Microsoft anymore or any recent software at this point.