New toy at work: micro-review

[mdlbear]

It's getting close to the end of the fiscal year, so it's time to use up the leftovers in the budget. And my desktop machine, a 2.2GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM, was getting a little long in the tooth. The replacement is a Dell Optiplex GX620 -- 3GHz Pentium D with 2GB of RAM, a 250GB SATA drive and an ATI Radeon X600. I did a basic install of Debian Etch yesterday afternoon, and spent much of today getting it configured. I was delighted to observe that the current Etch installer knows how to resize NTFS partitions, so I was able to keep the Win$ install (might as well, since we'd already paid for it).

The only real problem so far has been that the X configuration program mis-identified the driver as "ati" when it should have been "radeon". With that fixed, X came right up. Probably version skew. The other glitch was that I didn't see the usual option of editing the apt.sources file by hand (probably just spaced out going through the menus), so it ended up taking an hour to download packages. If I'd been thinking I'd have waited to run tasksel until after the initial install.

It's a reasonably small, moderately quiet box; you can either stand it on edge like a little tower, or lay it down flat and maybe use it as a monitor stand. No PS2 ports, so you need PS2-to-USB adapters if, like me, you're addicted to particular models of antique keyboard (IBM Model M) and trackball (Logitech FX).

All-in-all it looks like a decent desktop machine; it'll probably take me most of tomorrow to copy my files over and fill in the holes in the install, but that's not too bad.