i spent yesterday afternoon building a computer. it worked first time, although today i found that i’d obviously stuffed up the mic connector to the motherboard. when i can be bothered i’ll crack open the case and sort it. the point, though, is that the hardware isn’t so hard.
i loaded ubuntu feisty fawn, which i love to bits. however, there are some issues. i have been trying to get the same kind of services on my new machine that i have on my mac and windows machine. i’ve been successful in installing everything i set out to, but with various degrees of buggeration required. who knew, for example, that you could install a media player that wouldn’t play mp3s without importing codecs? or that even though there is a linux version of realplayer (required to stream the bbc), that you’d need to visit a dozen help pages to get it working. even getting the proper resolution on my new 20″ widescreen took a couple of hours to get right.
so the hardware is easier than the software. i guess that’s not so surprising. but no failures yet, just a bit of aggro.
by popular request, these are the bits:
20″ Viewsonic VX2025wm Silver/Bla 1 £198.99
AMD AM2 Athlon 64 3800+ Windsor Co 1 £43.39
Asus M2NBP-VM-CSM, nVidia C19, S AM 1 £44.77
2Gb (2X1Gb) Corsair Value Select, D 1 £39.53
SilverStone ‘SUGO’ Evolution SG01B 1 £64.39
500 Gb Western Digital WD5000AAKS C 1 £62.54
Optiarc (Sony/NEC) AD-7170S-0B 18x 1 £16.99
330W Seasonic S12-330 Silent aPFC H 1 £32.00
