Dead hardware

So both my pc’s at home have died…

My desktop has a failed disk, so I cannot do much with it. It also has other problems, so I am replacing the whole thing. A nice new dual core 64-bit machine is on it’s way to me.

My server died after I tried to add a new disk to it. I tried turning it on and nothing happened. So I grabbed a speaker from my box of PC parts and found that it beeped 11 times. Pulling out every card in it did not help, and eventually I tried swapping the graphics card with the one from my desktop. That worked, but even with a new graphics card it takes several attempts at booting to get it up. Even then it only lasts a few days before the kernel panics. Don’t ask me why adding a disk caused the thing to fail though.
So I am replacing it too, but with the cheapest parts I could find to build a new pc from.

I will have great fun installing both of them, especially as I will need to dig out a network cable to actually my desktop hooked up to the net to install Linux. I suppose I could download a set of Debian cd’s, but even then I will probably have to compile my network driver myself. As it will be a 64 bit-box I obviously want to run 64-bit Linux, but Debian does not have a release of that yet. I could try the testing level of Debian, as it has a 64-bit setup, but I am actually thinking of trying out Ubuntu (or as I am a fan of KDE, Kubuntu)as it has had a 64-bit release for quite a while and is very similar to Debian – it is probably better suited to a desktop than Debian is.