One of my friends wanted me to build a PC from scratch, with the parts HE wanted (rather than a pre built one). So I thought ‘lets blog it from the very beginning to the end’.

The challenge – a decent PC (not for gaming but one with a bit of grunt and the ability to run some virtual OS’s too)
The budget – about AUD$500 but as a guide only. There was room for movement (just as well)

So the research began. AMD or intel CPU? What sort of motherboard? How much RAM? What sort of graphics card? And certainly how big a power supply to run it all? And after the hardware was sorted out, what OS did he want to run?

After much deliberation, we decided on the following hardware (or very similar):

AMD X4 Phenom II 9650 CPU (the general consensus was a quad core of some kind)
Gigabyte motherboard
4Gig RAM
Sunflower case of some sort (a workmate told me they are pretty good)
ATI graphics card (at least 512M)
1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD
SATA DVD burner

As far as the OS was concerned, my friend decided on wanting to run OpenSuse 11.1 as the main OS, and probably Vista X64 in a virtual image for the stuff he could not find Linux equivalents for.

So, off to the shop I went with him to buy all the gear.

Next post, I will share what harwdware we ended up getting and the total cost …..

At 3.31 PST on Friday 13th, or on Valentines day depending whre you live, Unix computer clocks reached the time of 1234567890–1.2 billion seconds elapsed from January 1, 1970, the official beginning of the Unix epoch.

The clock is used not just by Unix, but also by Linux, Java, JavaScript, Mac OS X, and various other technologies.

That’s my bit of trivia for this week

I don’t use shell scripts too often and had a brain dead moment on how to execute a shell script.

So, for the dummies , here’s a summary so next time I forget I can quickly look at my posts:

For Creating Shell programs
# vi filename.sh (vi is one of many text editors for linux systems)

For Running Shell Programs
# sh filename.sh
or
# chmod 744 filename.sh (you need to change the permission so you, the owner, can execute the script)
#./filename.sh

I was after some software to clone a Windows XP machine onto 20 other identical machines – the main idea was to eliminate the need to install XP from scratch on each machine.

Now before I go further, I should mention that my client owned a volume license for these XP machines.

I did a bit of research (as you will find further on not enough) and came to the conclusion that Norton Ghost would be best for the job. I purchased the applicable license and proceeded to make the image – or in Ghost speak it is called a recovery point. I liked how you were able to make an additional recovery point (during the same process) to an external hard drive.

It was fairly straightforward to do, and the recovery process was no problem either. Worked well.

The only thing I didn’t like was, for what I wanted anyway, was the idea of having to install the product and then make an image (with the software installed) – if you know what I mean.

It so happened the day, after I discovered Clonezilla, an open source imaging program that worked from a Live CD (which I believe is based on a Debian backend).

I decided to give it a go, and found that it required a little more nouse to get it going – by no means rocket science though. It’s just that they were a lot of user options available, and as you were reminded multiple times along the way, if you didn’t understand what was being asked just select the defaults. So I did and it all worked well. A restore was much the same deal.

In summary, both products performed well. The average time to backup was about 15 mins for both Ghost and Clonezilla, with the restore (again with both) being under 5 minutes.

For my particular needs, Clonezilla was the choice of imaging/cloning software.

My terminal emulation program of choice is PuTTY. It’s a small, simple but very functional piece of software. My only gripe with it has been that it doesn’t have a facility for multiple sessions or tabs – like Secure CRT for example.

But today I found something that does the job. It’s call the PuTTY Connection Manager.

The features are as follows (copied straight from the website):

* Tabs and dockable windows for PuTTY instances.
* Fully compatible with PuTTY configuration (using registry).
* Easily customizable to optimize workspace (fullscreen, minimze to tray, add/remove toolbar, etc…).
* Automatic login feature regardless to protocol restrictions (user keyboard simulation).
* Post-login commands (execute any shell command when logged).
* Connection Manager : Manage a large number of connections with specific configuration (auto-login, specific PuTTY Session, post-command, etc…).
* Quick connect toolbar to quickly launch a PuTTY connection.
* Import/Export whole connections informations to XML format (generate your configuration automatically from another tool and import it, or export your configuration for backup purpose).
* Encrypted configuration database option available to store connections informations safely (external library supporting AES algorithm used with key sizes of 128, 192 and 256 bits, please refer for the legal status of encryption software in your country).
* Standalone executable, no setup required.
* Localizable : English (default) and French available (only when using setup version, standalone is english only).
* Completely free for non-commercial, and personal use : PuTTY Connection Manager is freeware.

I must say it works quite well. I tend to have multiple SSH sessions to devices at once and it handles it quite well.