Got a bargain on trademe today. A desktop with 1GB memory, twin 40GB hard drives (with bays for two more disks), cd writer plus dvd write (plus bays for two more of those as well, why would anyone want to ?), plus TV card and lots of other stuff I’ll never use. Plus a microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse. All for $142; the keyboard and mouse alone would cost more that that.
And best of all, I only started looking at PCs because I blew up a video card in one of my PCs, to replace it with a new one, or even one off trademe, would have been well over $100; and that PC only had 512Mb of memory.
So a fantastic bargain, of course the reason the bidding was so low was probably so low was because it came with the Korean version of Windows-XP. I powered it on to make sure it worked, and couldn’t read a thing, but it goes. Of course I intend to install Linux on it so it doesn’t matter to me what OS came on it, but the machine should have gone for $500-$600, I got a bargain because I don’t like Windows. All those poor windows users that didn’t bid just because it had the Korean version of windows lost out here.
Of course I did hit a wee problem, I can’t find my blasted Fedora Core 10 install DVD; I need to boot off that to do a network install from my Kickstart server. While I could probably coble together a boot CD from the network install images there is a comfort in having the actual install DVD handy, so downloading that again. It’s only going to take another six hours … SPLAT download failed after 700MB.
I’ll try and get the live CD and see if I can network install off that instead, and the day was going so well.
update 2009/04/17 – network install sucessfull, after a trip into bios to fix disk selection, now running on /dev/sda. Software mostly updated, extra packages added, iptables done, and ntp setup to sync from my internal network time server. All good to go. Have changes /dev/sdb to one large partition, it can be a new /home filesystem; think I’ll make it a normal ext3 and not LVM, for reasons to be covered in a later post discussing some issues I had mounting an LVM dive without a boot drive available that I want to look into further before posting on.
