Minimum hardware specs

This shouldn't be a machine you're going to use for anything else. If you can afford a new, fast machine, or just happen to have one lying around, great. Otherwise, you can get a perfectly adequate PC secondhand. You'll need at least:

• A 400 Mhz Pentium II.
• 256 Mb RAM.
• Two hard disks of exactly the same size, at least 60 Gb. You'll probably want to buy these new. Newer disks are often significantly faster than older ones (look at the number of revolutions per minute in the drive's specs), and they're quite cheap these days.
• A 10 Mbit Ethernet card. Make sure there's a Linux driver for it.

On an IDE controller, one drive is the 'master', and the other is the 'slave'. This is determined by the settings of switches on the drives. The instructions on setting the switches are often printed on a label on the drive, but after you've installed the drive, the label may be hidden. It's a good idea, therefore, to make a note of those instructions, in case you need to change the switch settings later.

BIOS settings

If the BIOS has an option for putting the system into suspend mode after a period of time, disable it.

Other network hardware

Other network hardware is discussed in Getting a network connection.
to top