[Eug-lug] This week's meeting - back to basics (and components)

[T. Joseph CARTER]

On Monday, I placed an order at Newegg:

 - AMD Sempiron 1.5 GHz (2200+ in marketspeak)
 - 256MB PC2700 RAM
 - Maxtor 40 GB ATA133 drive
 - Logitech cordless keyboard/rodent
 - Some AMD cooler that looks useful
 - ASUS bare-bones thingy

Cost of parts?  About $330, shipped.  It's not nearly as cool as something
like the Mac mini, and doesn't have its features (DVD/CDRW, firewire, cute
and tiny package, 56k modem, halfway usable video, etc), but it's a useful
pile of wintel parts.  And it's a pile of parts that anyone reading this
list could put together and get working, probably in about an hour.  I
thought that perhaps Walter and others who are still learning about the
innards of their systems might be interested in this process.

For my second trick of the evening, I'm going to use a live Linux CD
(probably Knoppix or Ubuntu or something) to make the system work.  Once
the hardware is running, I'll have to figure out what hardware there is
and how to make it work.  Truth is, it's been a whole generation since I
last used Linux, and I've never used FreeBSD.  So really, I have no idea
what I'm doing anymore, despite my ten years of experience with UNIXish
operating systems.  It could be amusing for "watch Joseph not have a clue
how to do any of this crap anymore" reasons, if nothing else.

All of this is contingent on the other half of my order arriving tomorrow
(depending on FedEx and apparently the phase of the moon), of course, and
I intend to cheat a little by bringing a few things I've already got as
well to finish off the system (a screen, for instance!)


If you really want to see this process start to finish, please let me know
so that I don't start before you arrive.  ;)



BTW, hey Mike, does computerbase happen to have thumbscrews?  This thing
(ASUS Terminator) has two screws, one of them is a pretty standard type,
the other would be if not for being rather long.  If you've got them, I'm
interested.  Given how cheap this thing is, it's amazingly easy to get at
its innards after you take out those two screws.  It'd be so much nicer if
you didn't have to worry about them.  =)