I picked up a Dell Optiplex SX280 from eBay last week with the intention of setting it up as a dedicated Linux box. Previously I have always worked with dual boots but I decided it was time to have the best of both worlds full-time.

The install went pretty well although it’s been a while since I did anything in Linux. I came a bit of a cropper trying to partition the hard disk. The auto partition scheme was great and worked fine but didn’t make a separate /var and /tmp, which I wanted. So, I resorted to doing it manually but was baffled by cfdisk and working with extended/logical partitions and the fact I couldn’t choose the FS I wanted. Naturally, I shortly discovered that cfdisk doesn’t make filesystems and that comes later in the install.

After that it all went pretty flawlessly. I have used Arch Linux a lot before so the set-up was pretty simple once the OS was actually installed.

Now to set up the services.