Some time ago, my monitor died. Sizzling noise, puff of acrid smoke, and then all was darkness. My father had recently upgraded his computer and monitor, and had offered them to me. I called and asked if he still had the monitor, and if I could still have it. He brought it over, but he also brought the computer as well. It was a 200 MHz Pentium II, which was a little slow for my needs, so Karen and I were going to try and donate it.

Well, nobody wanted it, so I was just going to cannibalize the useful parts and throw the rest out. But then I remembered that I'd picked up the Corel® Linux® OS Starter Kit for $7 from the remainder table at Borders a couple of months ago. I'd planned on creating a Linux partition on my hard drive, but my ancient version of Partition Magic didn't run under Windows XP.

Looking at the back panel of the computer, I realized that I had a motherboard with an 800 MHz Duron that might fit, as the ports appeared to be positioned in the standard ATX configuration. So I pulled out the innards, and spent a couple of hours trying to make things work.

For starters, the motherboard wouldn't quite fit; it had two serial ports, and the Dell case only had a cutout for one port. Fortunately, the cutouts were on a separate panel, which I knocked out. I also had to remove one case fan, because the CPU fan on my motherboard was too tall. Since the Dell motherboard didn't have a CPU fan, I wasn't too worried about taking out the case fan.

Next, I discovered that the Dell power supply wouldn't work with my motherboard. It had two connectors (ATX and auxiliary), and wouldn't send power to the ATX connector unless the auxiliary connector was also attached to the motherboard — but my motherboard had no auxiliary connector. So I pulled that out and stuck in another power supply I had lying around. Unfortunately, as the motherboard was a bit shorter than the Dell's, the front-panel cable wouldn't reach (and had a different pinout anyway), so I juryrigged an extender to the main power switch. The LEDs aren't necessary for operation, and I can get by without a reset switch for now.

I booted the computer, and it started loading Windows more or less properly (it complained of some drivers not being found), so I rebooted and started the install of Linux. Or at least I tried to. The splash screen assured me that it was loading Linux, starting Linux... and then nothing.

After a great deal of headache, I discovered that the drives were jumpered to use Cable Select, rather than being explicitly set to Master/Slave, and I'd rearranged the cable order due to the shortened motherboard. So Drive C was the (empty) Zip drive, and Linux didn't appear to like that. Once I got the hard drive as Drive C, Linux installed without a flaw.

The environment (a modified KDE) seemed quite spiffy, but lacking a network card, I felt pretty limited; I couldn't download updates or install new software (it came with Netscape 4.7, for example). So today I'll be buying a network card and a KVM switch (so I can get the second keyboard and mouse off my desk, and quit having to swap the monitor cable between computers when I want to use one or the other).

I'd always heard horror tales about how difficult Linux was to install, but once I got the drive-cable problem sorted out, it actually went in faster and easier than Windows XP. And since I use a lot of multiplatform software on Windows (The GIMP, Opera, POV-Ray, etc.), I shouldn't have any trouble bouncing between systems. Before I customize my system too much, though, I think I'll download different Linux distributions and see which one I like the best. Corel Linux seems nice, but the latest edition is two years old.

Now comes the difficult part: what to name the new computer...