Does anyone know a bootable partition editor that I can use before installing Linux?

Try Gparted LiveCD.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Sorry for the slow response..

Slow? If that was slow, you'd better start schooling the Pizza delivery people over here. I called an hour and 15 minutes ago and I'm still waiting for my order.

I tell you.. the Linux section is the nicest place to hang out round here. Take a break from the HW/Vista mayhem and do a short distro roundup down here for a change. [/half serious]

No kidding. Prompt, accurate answers, no flame wars and especially no "He shall not be named" posters getting on my last nerve...

If you install Linux you are either thinking for yourself or broke to the point that you welcome any help. I kind of fall into both camps

EDIT: We leave the flame wars for Linus and the Gnome developers...

Ohh.. KDE vs GNOME, not a AMD vs Intel or Microsoft vs the world, but close. I'm trying to get familiar with Linux since my chosen major and future profession will have me almost constantly working with it.

If you are talking about playing the learning game you could do worse than getting a Solaris install going on one of your rigs. Still very widely used and with good reason. Free personal / educational copies available plus the OpenSolaris goodness.

Seeing as I know a little about your HW collecting abilities you can also get into some interesting older HW for sensible money. Some of those old machines are now to be had for less than a mid range graphics card and will teach you so much about the other ways things can be done with HW/SW.

I wouldn't dream of offering that advice to a raw noob but I know you can read a manual and form a question. Plus I know you would enjoy it

Damn right. To the lady of the houses chagrin, I've began amassing a sizable collection of old machines that are starting to clog up my basement laboratory.

Items I would want in my lab:

SGI Indy - I loved the design
Sun SparcStation IPX - Used to look after one many years ago. Most old sun hardware is well made and in it for the long haul.
DEC Alpha Server (anything 2100 upwards) - Great to get that old NT 3.51 running on Also VMS perversion to be had... oh my.

If you fancy a giggle old VAX systems can be got up and running with OpenVMS. There were some mighty machines that nowadays make no sense. Lots of SUN kit knocking around. If I had a couple of quid and some space I'd be in trouble.

Now that is fresh and clean. No wires running willy nilly, I'd be wiling to spend a couple of pounds for that.


This, probably has less power than my Tungsten C.

If you are a fan of nice wiring have a look inside some Naim hifi kit some time.. older the better. Krell or Levison also get my engineers eye of approval.

The board looks clean and the lugable looks almost familiar. I started at college with an 8088 Oliveti lugable with 512Kb ram and a 640K floppy as my first proper PC. It was probably only a couple of years younger than that beast.

I've still got my 48K tucked away awaiting a suitable mount to be made. That might be a project for my dad this summer. And I thought I had some junk knocking around. What with PC's and your cars I can see one big workshop in a few years..

I'm going to hate taking everything out of there when the builders come to put up the sheet rock and carpet/tile. I've grown fond of the bare cement and exposed ducting and wires.

Wow, I was going to answer after I finished a round of grading and looks like I missed an entire conversation . I most definitely second the use of GParted, as it has most assuredly has gotten me more than $100 in repayment beer/food (the currency of college) over the years. Nice interface, never seen it damage a partition (resizing an NTFS partition sanely sets the dirty flag in the superblock, letting Windows make sure that nothing is amiss)

On the subject of clean, nice hardware, the o2 I've procured and fallen in love with has some of the neatest wiring I've ever seen, when you can find it. The whole thing is very modular and completely tool-less before that was "in". Any of the main components can be replaced without opening the case and without any tools as everything is on an easily-removable sled.

I had an old dual sparc machine that I let slip out of my hands, but I have found a dual Alpha that I need to "coax" away from someone who's not using it . before I'm out of school I must have it.

Or you are somebody who is either an old UNIX geek or does more technical work that lends itself well to the OS. I easily qualify on the second part. I happen to do a lot of programming for my class assignments, which is odd as I'm not a CS major. Linux (or really any *nix with a decent text editor, C compiler, and X11 installed) fits the bill very nicely whereas MacOS X requires a bunch of tweaking and Windows is terrible to do that work on. I don't think I'm old enough to be a real UNIX geek as the heyday of the UNIX wars was about the time that I was born. There was a really big lull between the UNIX wars and the subsequent fall of the OS and the rise of Linux. That is when I got started on computers.

However, I *do* know a few old-timey UNIX geeks at my university and they seem to be very pleased that the UNIX-type operating systems are making a comeback and that younger people like me have taken an interest in using them. And learning how to actually use them- digging around in the guts of the OS editing .conf files with a CLI text editor, compiling a kernel, being able to work just as well in a text terminal as with X running, etc.

DaSickNinja: Old and unusual hardware can be pretty neat to fool around with. Modern hardware is so...bland. Apart from possibly putting together a dual-CPU workstation or a tiny SFF machine, every machine in the last decade or so is pretty much a clone the others, just a little faster. They all have very similar CPUs and layouts. It's almost impossible to find something other than the standard ATX or mini-ATX running an x86 CPU except if you want to drop some really serious coin on a server, and even those are becoming standard x86 machines. x86 is decent and all, but for some things, other CPU archs do better and it would be neat to have those choices as well. However with Apple no longer using PowerPC CPUs, it looks like just about everything under $5000 will be x86.

Too bad that the oldest and oddest machine I have is my 5-year-old laptop, and that's still being used on a daily basis. And compared to the stuff you guys are talking about, it's practically new. And a Pentium 4-M CPU is nothing special anyway. Maybe I'll find a

I'm trying to get my hands on a Cray...

Actually, while we're on the off topic-ness of interesting hardware...

At work I work with a lot of Thin Clients that run off a terminal server. These are Wyse S30 model thin clients. They have a AMD Geode Processor, 32mb Onboard video, 10/100 ethernet, sound, 4 usb sockets and come embeded with Windows CE or Linux.

Now, my interest is that I'd like to pick one of these up, and install Linux into the embedded memory.. 8) I want to look at putting one of these into my Nissan Silvia to build an in-car telemetry system (looking at writing it in Python), which could also handle MP3's and other stuff in my car I could expand the memory more by hacking a USB-SD card adaptor onto the mainboard and then just plug in a 2-4Gb Flash drive.

Anyone know much about the process of installing software into the thin clients? I'd be really interested into finding out more...

Ever since I saw a picture of a Cray 1 I have wanted to turn one into a Lava lamp with seating.. Ultimate geek reception space.

Sounds like you plan to make your own ETS type system..

@AV
Now ow would that work?