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Darius Greywind:
So I acquire an old HP Celery 633 for free, which had been incredibly useless under WinME (surprise). So I figure, lets toss Fedora Core 2 on there, and see what we can do with it. Well, after loading it up with IRC, FTP, Samba, CUPS, BIND, Apache, FBMUCK (just to prove I could get it working), and most importantly Webmin, its still chugging away, and has been for four months, without a single reboot. No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor, just OpenSSH and Webmin. $10 UPS guarantees no power spikes will affect it, and oddly enough, this cheap pile has a BIOS option for auto-power-on-after-power-fail. After realizing just what a hog Gnome is, its default is now runlevel 3 (no GUI). The lack of monitor makes X completely irrelevant anyways, since this isnt for workstation use. It's attached to my LaserJet 5P, which Samba happily shares on the network. The FTP directory is also a local share on Samba, so I only need an FTP client when not on my internal network. And it all just works. I love that part.

I've tried Win2k3 ES before, and it chokes just running IRC on a 1.7ghz Athlon. The at least-weekly reboots werent much fun either.

CarLOS:
Awesome!

You're right - don't trash those old comps! They make great servers, even if just a firewall/router and print server


Quote
After realizing just what a hog Gnome is, its default is now runlevel 3 (no GUI).


Gnome and KDE...bleah

Personally, I found IceWM is "t3h r0x0r" for lightweight functionality and configurability. If you need a desktop file manager, dfm is a nice lightweight match for Ice

Darius Greywind:
I tend to prefer KDE, probably because I got used to Mandrake years ago. At any rate, GUIs are silly for a headless server machine. Between Webmin and the Secure SHell, any management tasks I choose can be easily accomplished. Like, compiling and installing software whilst hundreds of miles away at a furcon.

The only question is if when I rebuild this thing with better components, will I switch to WBEL, assuming it's caught up with the soon to be released next revision of RHEL. If its not ready, FC3 looks like the most likely choice. I happen to like the way RPM works as a package manager much better than the alternatives. The current RHEL/WBEL is inadequate, as I require the 2.6 kernel.

Notes:
RHEL - Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a server OS that costs a bundle
WBEL - Same thing, minus all Red Hat logos, available as a free download.

CarLOS:
How heavy a load you expecting? Do you really need RHEL/WHEL? Just curious.

Freshmeat.net has a lot of great goodies. Helps if you are familiar with compiling from source though....

./configure
*pull hair out getting dpendencies*
make
*bang head on keyboard as you read "gcc exited on Error[1]"*
make install
*where did it put the dang binary anyway?*

LOL!!

<glutton for punishment>
And I wouldn't have it any other way
</glutton for punishment>

Darius Greywind:
So far, I've had little trouble building apps from source. Thats the primary reason I require a cutting edge Linux distro. Using WBEL is mostly about having a more sensible set of defaults for server use. I've compiled the kernel, but gave up since I prefer to just get the latest RPMs when they come out.

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