981030 Friday
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Spend evening searching for cheap hardware.
Had pretty much settled on the idea of running an AMD K6 2 on a
cheapish socket 7 motherboard.
Choice peripherals, or Insight as they are now known seemed to
have the best deal in town.
Next stop was a linux site to check the hardware compatibility.
It transpired that the K6 had been troublesome in some Linux setups.
The only tier 1, (wholly supported) processors, for the Red Hat
distribution were genuine Intel.
Not wanting a Celery, I determined that I would stick with socket 7,
and searched the web for a source of cheap old Intel Pentiums.
the rational being that if it all went to plan, then I could upgrade
to a cheap but fast K6 later.

I eventually found Aria, in Manchester, who would provide an
Intel P166MMX for 39 UKP + VAT.
They also had some very cheap hardware to surround it.
Eventually I ordered as follows...


Qty 1,	CPU-I-PM-166,	Price 39.00,	(INTEL PENTIUM MMX P166)
Qty 1,	CSE-MID-DP,	Price 16.00,	(DELUXE MIDI AT CASE)
Qty 1,	FAN-586,	Price 1.50,	(PENTIUM HEATSINK AND FAN UNIT)
Qty 1,	FLO-35,	Price 9.00,	(3' FLOPPY DRIVE)
Qty 1,	KEY-GEN-WIN95,	Price 5.50,	(GENERIC WINDOWS 95 KEYBOARD)
Qty 1,	MBP-GEN-10-TXPBI,	Price 55.00,	(TXPRO WITH 1MB CACHE )
Qty 1,	MEM-32-68-SD,	Price 23.00,	(32MB 168PIN 66MHz 10NS SD-RAM)
Qty 1,	MSE-GEN-3BTN,	Price 2.00,	(GENERIC 3 BUTTON MOUSE)

The motherboard comes from PC Chips and is designated M590. It
includes 16 bit SB compatable sound and 4 Meg AGP graphics on the
motherboard.
It supports bus speeds up to 100Mhz and chip speeds up to 350 Mhz so
there is plenty of room for upgrading later.

I already have a 1 gig hard drive from when I upgraded my Acorn RPC.
I also already have a monitor in the corner which will be sufficient.
The 24 speed IDE CD Rom drive in my RPC can be pressed into service
and replaced with a SCSI one when funds permit.

This gives me a total outlay on hardware of 151 UKP + vat = 177.42 UKP.

Aria take a phone number and phone you back to confirm availability
and to take you Credit Card details.
I expect a call at work on Monday 2nd October.

981031 Saturday
---------------
Todays web search is all about which distribution of Linux to get.
I didn't want to just download Linux from the internet. I want to
make the process as simple and painless as possible.
The Choices seem to be Red Hat, SUSE, or BSD.
Solaris for Intel is now free for non business use from Sun, as
is SCO UNIX.
However, in the spirit of GNU, I wanted a free OS with no ties.
Linux seems to be the only game in town.
I seem to recall that there were 2 competing desktop environments
for Linux at the moment. KDE and Gnome.
I settled on KDE for no better reason than it seems to have the
highest profile and most backing. Red Hat have gone on record as
saying that they won't ship KDE with their 'shrink wrap'.
SUSE do from distribution 5.3 onwards.
So the choice is to get SUSE, with KDE. with the disadvantage that
SUSE is a German organisation and their support is in the German
language.
Or to get Red Hat, and add KDE afterwards, maybe downloading from
a FTP server. The advantage of this is that Red Hat seems to be the
acknowledged market leader for Linux distribution in the English language,
and is also deemed to be the easiest for an absolute beginner to set up.

Red hat it is.
Red Hat is distributed by Simply computers, (29 UKP + VAT + Postage)
	By the CD-ROM Cellar, (28 UKP +2.50 Postage inclusive)
	By Internet direct from the USA. (  49.95 USD + postage +
	surface mail wait)

... CD-ROM Cellar it is !
I will phone them on Monday. No Credit card surcharge either.