It's a LINI
It's the end of the year, and as sometimes happens there was some money leftover to spend on hardware. LWN editor Forrest Cook did most of the research, the ordering, and has plans to talk about the hardware in detail in some future article, but we both got new systems this week. Mine arrived yesterday, but the promise of its arrival was enough to discourage me from installing anything new on my old and oh so slow secondary test box, a 350 Mhz Pentium 2. Instead I spent extra time making sure that I had good backups to transfer to my new system.
So yesterday I got home with the new box and then applied admirable restraint by first processing the Tuesday security updates, finishing up the rest of the daily page updates and even spent an hour or so updating entries in the Distributions list before diving into the box and setting up my new LINI PC with the Antec Aria Cube case. It's small and super quiet and it came with Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" installed on it's 200 GB hard drive.
This frees up my current work box, a 1.4 Ghz Athlon system, for testing
purposes. The old Pentium 2 box will probably be turned into an
IP masquerade box/dhcp server, allowing me to connect more than
one host to my cable modem without a time consuming reboot/power cycle
operation.
Next year I resolve to spend more time playing around with some subset
of the over 400 distributions on our active list.