New used hardware

I picked up some used hardware the other day. Two Asus Pentium II motherboards with 233MHz and 266MHz processors for $0.99 and $1.99 respectively. I'm not sure what I'll do with the boards yet, but I've been toying with a few ideas for file/print/dialup servers and I'll probably create another mp3 box.

What I'm discovering is that it's tough to find cheap desktop cases, everyone has tower ATX cases which don't look anything like a stereo component. The case is the main obstacle to getting these machines running. I already have a couple of processor-less boards sitting in my closet, though one is both slot and socket.

The past couple of weeks I've also been thinking about wiring up the house with Cat 5 cable and creating a dial-on-demand dialup server so that Roy could access the Internet and I could keep my modem. I'd go broadband, but I don't plan on staying here much longer.

I also picked up a couple of 10/100 NICs for $0.99 each, a real find since I'm down to a 10MB/s card with both RJ45 and BNC connectors. Some guys were dumpster diving and I sallied nearby and saw them toss a couple of external SCSI cables to the front so I reached in and grabbed them. There was an old Alpha in the dumpster with the top removed. It looked too awkward, and because I wasn't there for Alphas (I was looking for a Sun box) I decided to leave it, but I did pull a RAM chip from a nearby board...I still haven't checked to see what the chip is.

Last night I spent some time at Kevin's house trying to figure out why his palm III wouldn't sync under SuSE 9.2. Everything looked in order package-wise, though he had a little bit of misconfiguration in KPilot, I would imagine it happened after things didn't work. As it turns out, the real problem was that permissions were not properly set for /dev/ttyS0. The sojurn reminded me that I really should get my m125 syncing under Linux again. I haven't used my palm much because it eats 2 AAA batteries every day! If you're thinking of buying a used m125 - beware! I'm also not a big fan of the screen - the screen is too dark for my taste. But I love handheld technology, and having sunk another $125 into a logitech keyboard for my m125 I'm not so quick to give it up. The Avantgo software/service is my favourite thing about the Palm, but I've never set it up under Linux, though there appears to be a connector for KDE.

Daniel Allen, a co-developer on The Working Centre Linux Project, got an article published in Linux Journal this month - congratulations Daniel!

I've been mulling through Marcel Gagne's Moving to Linux the Business Desktop. Chapter 9 was a bit difficult to follow, but most of the chapters have been the same old stuff I already know with one pleasent exception:

rpm --rebuild

I didn't know you could rebuild new rpms on older systems. According to the book I can take a rpm designed for Fedora Core and rebuild it for Red Hat 7.2. -- news to me. I'm a little disappointed there haven't been a lot of "business ideas" in the book. I think I'd like something that adds a few case studies beside examples. I wonder if the reverse would be true of rebuild? Could I take a Red Hat 7.2 binary and rebuild it for Fedora Core? How about another architecture?

Tomorrow I'll be dropping by The Working Centre to add a couple of accounts to the samba file server. Apparently a couple of the guys want areas to privately store stuff...hmmn, sounds like porn., maybe I'll also add a script that reports if a particular user is using a lot of space...