Found another bargain PC on trademe to replace yet another I have blown the video chip on a motherboard on. Looks like my 17inch LCD is what was causing everything to fry somehow, it just made the new one beep a lot.
Swapped out the 17inch and replaced it with a spare 15inch LCD screen I had and everything worked fine on the new one (alas the video chips on the old ones are dead; can probably just swap those bits off the motherboards ???, will have to check). And Vista didn’t recognise the Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse I was using (WinXP and FC12 had no problem with it), so those ended up on the couch and I used a USB mouse and USB keyboard instead.
Anyway, the new one is not top of the line (only 1.5Gb of memory), but certainly more powerful than anything I already had and I had no existing PC with more than 1Gb of memory so certainly can’t complain, for only $194 as well.
Come with 3disks in it, an 80Gb with Vista installed (and licensed according to the system info), plus two 100Gb drives; currently ntfs and empty.
Haven’t connected to the web to check the license yet, want AVG and SpyBot and AdAware run over it before I plug it in to my network; and then plug it in and get updates for those and check again. After all the effort to keep nasties off my network I’m not going to plug a new machine right into the middle of it without being as carefull as I can.
Will need to try to gparted the 80Gb (don’t really need (or like) Vista, but will keep it around for now) to slice the Vista partition down to about 30Gb, and make it dual boot with FC13 on the other 50Gb.
And then make the two 100Gb disks either a linix LVM 100Gb software mirror pair, or just a 200Gb single LVM PV.
But that is a few weekends away yet. I wonder what Vista will do when two disks it knows about are suddenly changed to a format it cannot recognise ?, will have to research that, may need to keep a 5Gb ntfs slice on each to keep it happy. Which tends to imply I will keep Vista on there… but I would only need it for when XP goes out of support; to also check, end of life dates, XP keeps hanging in there and it XP and Vista go out of support around the same time
FC13 was released today, downloading the DVD image now so I can build a local base repository and try and upgrade my two main machines using that instead of chewing up bandwidth.
And of course I need the full DVD setup anyway for the webserver so I can build a hands-off pxe boot network install/kickstart for FC13; that also is a few weeks away as I had a lot of trouble migrating the hands-off install from FC11 to FC12 (not just kickstart script and package changes but the included mysql upgrade caused me a few headaches as well) and expect probs again here as well, so it will need a lot of spare time.
So I have quite a few weekends filled up now (and as I pretty much work three out of every four of them these days so can’t do my own stuff, this will keep me busy for a while).
Only 5hrs to go for the DVD download. Theoretically I can build the local repository on my kickstart server tomorrow, then take another 6-7hrs to mirror that on to my backup kickstart server. And be ready to try my first preupgrade upgrade on Friday. Hmm, I expect probs, maybe Saturday then when I have more time.
