I have a K6-2/350, 128mb, 8+4gb HD. I'm going to be installing a 32mb TNT2 tonight. After that, I'm probably going to try and find a K6-2/550, and maybe add a 256mb DIMM, but then I'm done with it.

I've speced out building a 1ghz+ machine on Computer Geeks and even though I could build a descent machine for around $300US ( not counting a monitor ), I'd rather hang with this one for a while. The heaviest app I'll use is Quake 3 ( not counting Mozilla, which can suck resources like none other ), and I'm looking to go portable after this. I currently have a work laptop I use ( Dell Inspiron 7000 - P2/366, 160mb, 10gb, ATI Rage LT 8mb ) which I use more often since I can work from the couch, plus it's a descent gaming laptop ( big 14.1 screen, and 30fps in Quake when tweaked out. )

I'm holding out for when the Geforce2go or Mobility Radeon laptops get cheaper, then I'll snatch one up.

So 2 days later, I have Mdk 9.0 up and running using KDE 3.0 ( I used to be stuck on the minimalist look of blackbox, but since KDE is now much more polished I'm going back that way; besides, I've got memory/clock cycles to burn! ).

The only issue was with my SCSI card (aha1542). Mandrake has been the best about supporting this easily OOTB ( unlike Red Hat ), but this time it wouldn't configure it for the life of me. And if I tried, the resulting kernel insisted on insmoding it on startup which brought everything to a halt. I'll give it some effort, though I think I might forgo SCSI ( I've only got a Jaz drive and an external 1gb HD for mp3s that's already overflowing ) and move those devices to the PM 7100 sitting next to it. I've got a spare 4gb IDE that I'll drop in for mp3s, so that'll work.

Tonight I'll try to get my modem running. This usually goes smoothly, so I should be up and running 100% ( except for the scanner, blasted cheap ass parport model ).

Mandrake 9 is very good. Gcc 3.2 makes everything much faster. Great job Mandrake!

So I'm getting ready to install Mandrake 9.0 tonight. This will be my 5th try at going all Linux on my main box ( was at Win 2k before tonight ). Every go around seems promising at first, but then I find that I lack something essential and must return. Here's the main list of hang-ups that I've had.

• Lack of supermount - I understand why a root user should be the only one to mount HD partitions, but why on earth should this apply to CDs, floppies and other removeable media. The biggest PITA was working with a CD burner. I had to manually rig the permissions on the burner to be able to burn CDs ( then in Mandrake 8.1 they changed the device structure and that isn't easily done ). I would like all removeables chmod a+rwx and be able to mount and umount without root.
• Winmodem/Dial-up support - So I'm too (cheap|poor|lazy) to buy broadband, so I'm stuck with a Lucent chipset modem. Great driver support, but the last 3 times I've had to spend at least 4 hours getting to dial-in and auth and be able to access the network.
  By the same token, I would like PPP connections to auto start as needed. It's a pain to go in as root and start a PPP link.
• Gaming support - I would like a video card OTHER THAN a Geforce to have equal performance under XFree as in Windows. I have an old Permedia 2 chipset card ( yeh, I know it's really old, but still ) and would like to be able to use it for some light WineX gaming ( Axis and Allies, WC2 to name a few ). Quake 2 OpenGL would be nice, but I've played that combination in Windows and it is bad at best

• And there has been other issues, but those are the big ones. Largely, I would like to not have to use root so much for many trivial tasks IMHO ( removeable mounts, start/stop ppp link, etc ). From what I've seen, Mandrake 9.0 will solve those issues, so I'm hoping for the best.

  I'll keep everyone posted.