the friday blog

Server/Workstation Linux Build

Just a few weeks after rebuilding my small 600MHz Celeron it started making strange noises.

She was on her original disk which had been spinning, on and off, for the last ten years!

Although I was confident that she was being backed up correctly I couldn’t take the noise any more (I think it was coming from the power supply – being small form factor I would find it difficult to replace) and so I decided to retire her gracefully rather than get stressed when she finally died.

Rather than add another machine to the network I though it might be a good idea to utilise the Server as a writing machine.

After doing a full back up of the server (an old dual Xeon Dell Graphics Workstation with 2GB of ECC Ram and a 72GB SCSI hard drive) I started off by installing Debian Squeeze.

Actually, that’s a lie!

I first had a good play around with the latest version of Crunchbang and was very, very impressed!

There and then I decided that Openbox was going to be the window manager that I’d use on my eventual Writing Machine/Server!

Seriously, Crunchbang is extremely fast and very simple to use – it’s a candidate for my main PC already!