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Good story about it here

Utter rubbish. Me, being a complete *nix idiot then (and still pretty clueless now) was able to install OpenBSD without a hitch, found drivers for my exotic hardware and had the best community support you could wish for. .

In addition to being a great, functional and secure OS, it also has a outspoken, intelligent leader who is not afraid to stir up controversy for his political or technical beliefs.

Go Theo!

It always amuses me when folks these days talk about building a computer.

My first machine was a Ferguson Big Board, a Z80 based kit.

I was doing my Undergraduate degree (Math & Computer Science) and didn't have much money. A bunch of us bought these kits - and the cheapest options, just the etched board - then begged, borrowed and stole parts (well, I didn't really steal any but you get the idea).

We'd get together every Friday night for a soldering session - great excuse to drink beer! It took us almost three months to get them assembled, and another month or two of screwing about before they'd boot into CP/M.

I wanted a machine before that but waited for Z80's since they required substantially fewer support chips than 8080s. Some of my buddies built 8080 based systems, and it took them far, far longer.

Now that's building a computer!

I've integrated quite a few since, but don't really enjoy the experience as much as that first time.

not 286, chip was crippled really, remember dreaming of a 386 with a whopping 2MB of ram though. Stuck to my 8088 (yeah!) and the computers at uni until I could get hold of a monster 486 with 8MB - I was king... Remeber Pentium 60 (or was it 66?) and p90 just had come out then but that was far above my budget... :-)

Take a look at Buttercup. It's getting a GeForce 4MX 440SE 64MB with 64MB DDR. It has 512MB RAM, the highest an i815 motherboard can go up to. And it will probably do much, much more than anything a modded XBox can do. And even though the case is a bit bigger than an XBox, it isn't much bigger than a VCR or an audio receiver. Put a TV tuner card in there with MythTV and you have a TIVO.

Nevertheless there is enough documentation on the web and plenty of help on IRC (esp irc.openprojects.net #open-bsd), the newbie openbsd mailinglist, O'Reilly and man pages, so go for it and join up. Even Lowendpc has a good openbsd section for newbies. It's easier than you think, and the installation is a doddle.

...I could do this if I wanted to. All I would need would be more hard drives and more drive docks. Here's a peek at what I've been doing.

I'm guessing this is based around VIA's Eden Platform, aka EPIA. Which means that there won't be a floppy because EPIA HAS NO FSCKN FLOPPY CONTROLLER. If you want a floppy, use a USB floppy. Teac makes a fairly good one.

With floppy drives barely above $5 at the computer shows and prolly $5/drive right on the dot in the OEM channel, the lack of floppy makes no sense unless they are using EPIA or something like it.

BTW EPIA is not a power-user platform by any standard. The VIA CIII is very underpowered and best for low-stress applications. TANSTAAFL applies here.

Dirk

Case itself: A-Top 777. It's not exactly what I was looking for, but turned out to be decent for what I intend to do. This case would be great as a set-top box case..it's that ugly beige but that's nothing a spray can can't fix.

Power Supply: PC Power And Cooling SFX-S form-factor power supply. Get rid of the PS in this box...it looks like something that eMachines would throw into their POS boxen. There is an econo 145W version which is what I got...this is a PIII-based system, not an Athlon or P4. They also make a very decent AMD and P4 approved 180W PS that can handle the ABit NV7M nForce-based mATX motherboard without breaking a sweat.

Anyway, the combo of the A-Top 777 case and the PCPC power supply should be a fine one for my purposes. Will document the entire build at Low End PC.

Or if you want to see the true low-end hardcore:
http://www.lowendmac.com/

I have nothing but admiration for people who keep old machines alive, particularly when they spread their technological wealth around. Which reminds me: I will be decommissioning one of my machines soon. It was built in 1997 and was a real science experiment, hence the name it's held on my network, "Dexter." In fact, I brought the case cover to a comic convention and Genndy Tartakovsky drew his mad scientist character on it and autographed it for good measure.

Dexter has been useful for all these years, and it's only because I have some new stuff coming in that I have to reluctantly decommission it. I'm keeping an eye out for a deserving new home for the thing. The scanner is going out the door too...it's an UMAX 600P and it is not supported in any OS beyond 98SE. SANE doesn't support it and UMAX doesn't make a 2K or XP driver for it either. It also barfs if connected to a computer with a processor that runs at or above 300MHz. Timing prob. Still works like a champ, too.

This machine will be going to the Pacoima Community Center or somewhere else deserving.

It requires a keyboard to be 100% practical, but that will only cost you roughly $20 more, or less if you get an adapter plus a PS/2 or AT keyboard from your stash. (The Mad Katz adapter will play nicely with both, the others are PS/2 only but how many people still have AT keyboards lying around?)

Certainly using a real computer to surf and get your mail with is better than kludging it with a DC. But this is certainly the cheapest way on. And hey, you can play DC games with this too!

Hi, I'm Ms. Geek, and I'm a DC addict.

Budget is the key word here. This all started with a $30 motherboard I found at Overstock.Com. Most of the parts will come from my parts pile, and a good friend dropped an InWin mid-tower case with a Powerman/Sparkle 300W power supply on me, saying "happy holidays."

And much of the parts will come from a machine I rescued from a Doomed Dot Com. For details on that little adventure, follow this link: http://www.lowendpc.com/msgeek/2001/1030.html. I found the ultra-econo motherboard just after I wrote this article.

And what will be the original machine's fate? It will be a file and backup server for my home network. Running Linux. Yeah I had problems installing Mandrake but installing Debian or Red Hat on a machine that probably will never run XFree86 is not a problem.

That Radeon is tempting but very, very pricey. Also the TV Wonder is already in my parts pile.

Thanks for the ideas.

I've got the beginnings of something that can do ALL OF THE ABOVE.

For less than $200 I was able to pull together a computer that has part of the picture: it can play DVDs really, really well.

Swap out the Xpert128 for a PCI All-In-Wonder Radeon, add a nice audio card like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, and I'm good to go. I figure it will cost me less than $400 all told.

This machine's got brownie points because it runs on Linux, but barely. Yeah, I run this box on 2K Pro, but that's because ATI hasn't released specifics about their DVD acceleration to the Open Source community. Bug 'em until they do.

Even without that, and with a beefier processor to handle software DVD decoding, you could do this for a third of the price using commodity PC hardware. $1500? No freakin' way! Get the fsck out of here!

I am a big fan of sane bitty boxen. I recently acquired a microtower from a dot-bomb in Santa Barbara for a pittance. I'll be writing about my new acquisition in Low End PC next week or so. It's good to see good quality small form-factor PCs now. There are many, many applications for a small PC...sure it's not ultra-expandable but you don't need the expandability. The Firewire port does help for expandability, however...Firewire is your friend, unlike USB.

The only gripe I have with this is the Savage video subsystem. The absolute worst video chipset this side of the integrated video in an InHell i810 box.