I installed Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) on a shiny new system I just received… which barely fits under my desk.
Relevant stats:

2x Intel Pentium III 1.05GHz
2GB RAM
2x 250GB 7200RPM IDE hard drive
1x 80GB 7200RPM IDE hard drive
4x 40GB 7200RPM IDE hard drive
ATI Rage 128 (it is a server…)

With an onboard RAID device, and plenty of power, this system has support for 8 HDDs (room to grow!). It really is a thing of beauty. It also has room for 4 hard drive caddies, which each have built-in fans for cooling the HDDs.

I immediately installed Ubuntu server onto the system. After having it installed, I noticed that all of the documentation and guides out there were for the GUI version of Ubuntu. Apparently nobody uses Ubuntu for a server? So I scrapped that and reinstalled with the GUI version.

I found some great documentation for learning Ubuntu:

• http://ubuntuguide.org/
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDocumentation
• Oracle on Ubuntu

Speaking of… since one of the main reasons to switching to Ubuntu is to install Oracle, I decided to try installing Oracle 10g on Ubuntu.

Checking operating system version: must be redhat-3, SuSE-9, redhat-4, UnitedLinux-1.0, asianux-1 or asianux-2
Failed <<<<

ccole says you have to trick the system:

Add the following to new file /etc/redhat-release:
Red Hat Linux release 2.1 (drupal)

I’ve yet to try this, but I will as soon as possible.

So far, it looks to be working great. There are a couple of things I need to solve before I consider this a good replacement. Those things are, namely:

1. Where do I get the gcc compiler?
2. Java 1.5?
3. UFS r/w compatibility?
4. Vncviewer only has “takeover” mode, meaning the target machine still has all things viewable, potentially causing excess lag. How to get around this?