This weekend, I built a lean, mean desktop machine for a small church organisation. The bottom line was very important so I built from parts and used GNU/Linux to avoid “the tax” and donated my labour. AMD64 3500 AM2 1GB should do their bidding for many years to come.
The shopping took an hour. The assembly took an hour ( I am old, nearly blind, and I RTFM). It took two hours and several e-mails discussing and revising the proposal. To my distress, I could not find my CDs. I have recently moved and the CDs are somewhere in the pile. So, I tried to boot via USB drive after transferring a bootable image and the amd64-installer from Etch. Worked like a charm, but I did notice the machine paused for long periods during the boot… The installation was routine, about 15 minutes. I did a netinstall from my local repository. The sucker would not boot! Amazing! I could rescue, chroot into the installation and run it, but I could not get it to boot. I tried to setup grub several times and even installed LILO.
I started disconnecting devices but got nowhere. After a good night’s sleep, it occurred to me that these parts were COTS (Consumer Off The Shelf) and still on the market, so they must work. I had made a jumper change to make the hard drive the master and put the CD/DVD drive on a separate IDE cable, as this usually is a reasonable choice. I put the jumper back to cable select and it booted like a scalded cat, 24s to the login with about 5s delay for GRUB menu time. The system was crisp. I configured the printer and discovered that there were no drivers in Debian amd64 on the Brother support site. This was a multifunction machine MFC-7220 from Brother and Brother did have drivers for i386. I had already wasted hours on this and did not want to bother making 32 bit drivers work so I reinstalled in i386. Joy! Everything works.
I installed a few extra packages, configured desktop icons for the usual applications, password changing, file path indexing and searching and shipped the computer out.
This is an example why the DELL/Ubuntu deal is a big deal. If I could order a machine without “the tax” and having Linux preinstalled, I would have saved many hours of my time. Of course I am proud that the system is set up personally for friends but it would be good if I could do that for fewer hours of my time. DELL/Ubuntu can solve these little problems once and save hundreds of thousands of hours for their customers. If I had a lot of friends (;-), I could keep the parts list and an image of the installed disc system, but I rarely build two systems exactly the same. DELL does. The big time waster for me was a BIOS bug that would not deal properly with a master IDE drive (MSI K9VGM-V). Last year I wasted hours with a motherboard that would not boot from any drive but the third if four drives were installed (ASUS A8N-E). Go figure. That made my RAID 1 array somewhat silly and required manual reconfiguring of the boot loader for six servers. Linux is more ready for the desktop than some motherboard manufacturers.
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