The Ultimate Linux Box for the Consumer Market

It was about ten years ago that someone brought a copy of RH5.2 into class and said, "I give up, I can't make it work" ... I asked him if I could try.

I was hooked, but I was confused. Today I am still hooked, and still confused. All the tutorials I have encountered take me back bash commands, which I don't mind, but some of those bash command tutorials come without explanation. Going back to the days of DOS commands, I knew Dir was a directory query and I knew that putting in a -p switch would pause the list when the page was full. But I don't know what a pipe is, I know where to find it on my keyboard, but i don't know how to use it. With DOS, I had to learn because there was no internet available when I started. Now I follow tutorials and sometimes I gleen something from them, and sometimes I don't. For instance, to this day I can't find a single tutorial to explain how to use the hated Microsoft Boot Manager to choose linux from instead of installing Grub to the MBR.

The same I find is true with finding the "Ultimate Linux Machine". I can't find a guide for building a new linux box, one dedicated to linux. Smaller than my windows box in size, but as punchy. I want hardware I know will work on a basic install. I can't tell you how infuriating it is to listen to a Linux Guru tell me he doesn't know why my wifi didn't work, his works just fine without needing to modify anything. A year or so back I attempted to make the permanent switch to linux. I pulled windows off my rig and popped in (k)ubuntu, I had this problem with each of the two distros, when I went to install everything was fine through the install, but on the first reboot, I had a black screen. For two days I was without a computer because I was researching this issue. It seems that my monitor/video card arrangement wasn't recognized on install. I had to build an xorg.conf file. This to me was counter productive. Eventually i found there were many things I still missed from my windows box and went back to it.

Recently I decided to use an old laptop for Linux, I installed linux on it, it's a single core running at 1.73GHz with 2GB of Ram. I was enjoying things fine, until I went to watch something on Hulu, and again I was disappointed. In FireFox, hulu ran like mud, skipping, stuttering and lagging. Then I tried Hulu Desktop ... which worked fine for some time, then started to degrade. I checked specs and even in linux Hulu recommends a dual core processor, I understand this is not a linux issue but rather a 3rd Party Vendor issue lol don't get me started. Believe it or not I put Windows 7 in and am watching video fine.

So, before some of you start thinking this is some fanboi rant, well it is ... I am a fan of Linux, or at least I would like to be, otherwise I wouldn't keep coming back. It has nothing to do with my views of MS as a company or any other for that matter. I simply like being able to get in up to my elbows.

That being said, for me the Ultimate Linux Machine is the one someone else built, and I have worked on and it works well. I want to change this. I want it to be my rig. I want it to be my blood sweat and tears on the boards.

So if anyone can point me into the direction of a decent hardware compatibility site, that would be great.

Also, and I know one really should learn to crawl before they walk, I have an interest of building a server in house. Is there any reasons I couldn't use the same box as my workstation AND my server, since I won't be pushing it as hard as my windows machines?