I started with a stripped Intel board and put a Pentium 233MHz processor on it and 32MB of EDO RAM. I had a couple of hard drives, both Seagate, the 2GB drive was no good, but the 1.2GB worked fine. I managed to dig up all the components for a working system, minus the case. I think I'm going to put the first one in an old SGI Indigo case.
The next problem was that the TV out didn't seem to work, so I ended up grabbing an old monitor that could barely do 640x480, it sucks so bad that graphical boot loader screens look like a Picasso painting. The system booted fine until I ran into another problem, the ISA Ethernet card I was using, which had a Realtek 8019 chip, didn't seem to work. I replaced the card with a 10/100 Compaq NIC and was off to the races.
The next step was setting up an NFS server on my notebook; this was a snap thanks to YaST2's (SuSE) graphical tools - a NFS server in 20 seconds. I would have prefered to use Debian, but my discs are at The Working Centre and I don't have high speed at home. Installation from the NFS server went off with only a minor hitch, without a mouse it was difficult to control what software was being installed because there was no "scroll down" keyboard equivalent - I should have used the txt-network image. I plan on installing Debian anyway, so this may be a moot point. But here's a screen shot of the Mandrake install anyway:
Pictures to follow. Day 1, the project has been a success so far. Minor glitches. I believe the T.V. out problem to be an issue with my T.V. switching box, something to look into later. I definately need more NICs if I'm going to mass produce this thing. I made a brief start into SCSI but decided to leave the SCSI cards out for better use. I also need to gather some metal to refashion the old Indigo box. Work calls so I'll have to get moving for today.
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