On Sunday 26 July 2009, Adam wrote: > Mike Kershaw wrote: > > All in all you're probably better off time/money/electric > > consumption wise just getting a cheap new system, if you have to > > get a diagnostic card you're looking at a significant percentage > > of the cost of just replacing it. > > Thanks, Clyde and Mike, for your suggestions. This is a spare-time > "fun" project, so I was willing to devote some time but not much > money into this problem. It turned out that sequence of beeps > meant something like "CMOS data corrupt" and the problem was the > CMOS battery. The CMOS default is "onboard video" which explains > why there was no signal coming from the external video card when > the battery went dead. Tricky part was resetting that with no > video display, but I eventually succeeded and made sure to write > the keystrokes down. Time, a couple of hours. Money, under $4. > > Now the fun part is deciding which distros to try out on it -- I > think I can shoehorn four distros (plus WinXP and separate data > partition) onto its 60 GB HD. I'm most familiar with Mandriva and > have no particular objections to it but think it would be > interesting to try some others. Suggestions welcome, anybody!
If I were to make a "test Desktop" to try several Linux distros I guess I'd probably install distros that I had technical interests in. Probably along the lines of: Debian and/or Ubuntu Fedora Gentoo Arch Sabayon Puppy Vector Damn Small Nexenta OpenBSD For further ideas see http://distrowatch.com -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Jul 1 - Linux High Performance Computing Aug 5 - TBD Sept 2 - Linux and HDTV
