A while back Yahoo! had an event where they gave away spare, old computing equipment to employees for free. I picked up a Stackable Systems rackmount server with a Pentium 3 850 MHz and a 36 GB Seagate Cheetah drive. My hope was to make a Linux box out of this, since there are no less than 4 computers in my home and surprisingly, all are running Windows, disconcerting for a geek like myself. Sure I have Cygwin on my Windows machines, but nothing beats the real thing.
Back to my freebie machine, yesterday I started on bringing it to life. My first observation was that this machine is LOUD. I disabled all of the chassis fans, which made very little difference, so it turns out that it is the fan inside the power supply which is making the racket. I carefully took apart the power supply to verify this. The ball bearing fan inside the Sparkle Power power supply is small but makes itself heard. I had hoped that the fan was plugged in via a molex connector so I could easily replace it, but alas, it’s soldered in. Later on, after I determine if I can even do anything useful with this box, I’ll have to solder in a quieter fan, to improve the wife approval factor.
After futzing around with the BIOS to make it boot from a CD, some damaged Knoppix CDs, an iffy CD-ROM drive and IDE cable, and such, I booted it with a Knoppix 3.7 CD (which disconcertingly still had some bad sectors but seemed to work well enough). Knoppix did a fine job, recognizing the SCSI hard drive, network card, and Logitech MX-500 USB mouse. I partitioned the hard drive into 3 partitions:
- 35 GB Linux (type 83) – where I planned to put /
- 1 GB Linux (type 83) – where I planned to put /var – this should contain /var and prevent logs from filing up the root partition
- 1 GB swap (type 82) – machine only has 128 MB of RAM, so I figured it would need a lot of swap.
I debated splitting the 35 GB partition into two: one for / and one for /home, thinking that it would be nice to separate out data for ease of backups, but then it would be hard to choose the sizes of the two partitions and I didn’t want to short change either one so I just went with one. I guess I could always just tar up /home for backups anyway – not sure if a /home partition makes sense? Anyone have any thoughts here?
Then I made my 2 ext3 file systems with mkfs and my swap with mkswap. Nothing eventful there.
Then I did a knx2hd and followed the nice menus to install a “Debian” (other choices were “Beginner” and “Knoppix”) system to the hard drive. This would be a full Debian system with apt-get and such. I also chose to install LILO in the master boot record (MBR) as opposed to the root – I actually have no idea what the implications of this choice are so I simply picked the default. I got a lot of read errors from the CD-ROM, which bothered me (perhaps I should burn a fresh CD and redo the process?), but in the end I had a working Debian system christened “dulcinea” (tribute to Toad the Wet Sprocket) on my hard drive. I popped the CD out and rebooted and it booted into KDM and soon I had KDE on my screen. Then I noticed that the network wasn’t working so I had to manually do something in the KDE menus to configure the network card, which was actually a single question – “Do you want to enable DHCP broadcast?”. I answered yes and that was enough to get the network working – I need to figure out how to setup the network to start up automatically when the system boots – probably I will choose a static IP address as well. Then I wanted the latest and greatest so I did an apt-get upgrade and let it run overnight.
In the morning, it was waiting for me to answer it whether chkrootkit should be installed in the crontab – sure. And then did I want to overwrite my bash files? Sure. Then it installed a bunch of stuff and eventually failed because of problems with the a2ps package, which I think had a dependency on emacsen-common, which had not yet been configured… Eventually after a few iterations of apt-get I had everything pretty much up to date. And then I did some manual apt-gets to get things like jed, most, firefox, thunderbird, and valgrind. When I browsed with firefox to http://my.yahoo.com, I realized that I needed the Flash plugin – that was easy to download and install. While browsing with firefox, I noticed that the side buttons on my Logitech MX-500 mouse don’t do backward and forward like I would like. I’ll figure this out later perhaps. In reality, I may not use KDE much with this machine. I might just shove it in a closet and ssh to it from one of my Windows machines.
I used visudo to add my user account to /etc/sudoers. And then sudo crontab -e to add to the root crontab: 0 1 * * * /usr/bin/updatedb so that I can keep my locatedb fresh for quick searches with locate.
Then I messed around a bit with dselect, which is a frontend to apt-get. It looks cool, but I didn’t know exactly what I was doing so I didn’t change anything in there.
I think I should probably read the Debian installation manual – in fact, I probably should’ve read it BEFORE I started. Hopefully, I don’t find something in there that makes me realize that I should redo the whole thing 
