Dell E > Dell Inspiron 910 - Updates

This is an update to the previous post about Dell's new ULPC.

*It will be called the Dell Inspiron 910 (no deli jokes anymore ;-] )

*It will ship with Ubuntu 8.04 ! (Or that other proprietary operating system)...

The realease date is set to be around the 22nd of August for $300 (around £160!).

As soon as they are in the UK I am snagging one!

PowerMac + Ubuntu = Server Time!

While on holiday, I was helping my great-uncle out with his study room setup (I ended up saving him a switching of ISP!) and at the end he offered me a Mac that he bought in 2000, that he had replaced and therefore no longer used anymore. He was going to take it to the dump and so I gladly offered to take it back with me.

I took a look inside when back home, and found it was a PowerMac G4 with a 450Mhz PowerPC Processor and about 600mb of RAM (also with two 10GB hard drives). Just to make sure it all worked I fired up an Xubuntu LiveCD and was happy when I saw the familiar layout. Unfortunately, the Mac had just missed OSX and so when I booted from the HD was dissatisfied with the ugly UI that stood before me (I was expecting Aqua!).

After a lot of thought (and disappointment that Apple had made the case so it couldn't be used again) I decided to transform it into a server!

After a short while I had Ubuntu Server PowerPC installed and so I looked at trying to install OpenVZ (a virtualisation option for servers) so if anything went wrong, i still had my server, however after half a day of ploughing through poor PowerPC orientated documentation I took a step back and went to bed.

The next day I found out about an alternative to OpenVZ called VServer. This was much better documented and after about an hour I had it running perfectly :-)

Message of the Story?

If someone offers you an old Mac, kill two birds with one stone:
* Turn it into a server and gain a stylish shelf as well :-)