Ratsima

The Mac is a G4 1 GHz model that is five years old. It's slow. We use FUS and there are generally three users logged in. I also run a web cam and have torrents running most of the time. CPU load is very high, lots of pageouts and disk thrashing. I have installed Leopard and found it to be the most troublesome Mac OS ever. (A whole other story.)

I think I have enough 'nix experience to make a go of it. I first started using unix back in the late 80's. I've installed and used Linux before. (Even managed to get it to drive old token-ring cards....) I'm no expert, but I do manage to download and compile unix source code to run o the Mac.

Thanks for your help.

My iMac is five years old. Time to upgrade. Sadly, as a fixed income retired geezer I really can't justify the Mac's price premium. (Been using them since 1984.) So, I'm thinking of buying or building a linux box. But, I know nothing of current hardware choices: motherboards, processors, graphics cards, etc. I'm living in Isaan and the closest place with any significant IT shops is Korat.

Can someone point me to some hardware advice; specifically stuff that I might find locally?

I'm looking to spend about 20K baht. If I spend that on a built box I can get a Intel Core2Duo (2.4GHz) on a Gigabyte(31) motherboard with 1 GB RAM and onboard Gigabyte 512 MB video. Cheap monitor and keyboard included. I think I can do better building my own, but don't know where to begin. (Approximately equivalent iMac is 42K baht.)

I've searched a bit, but the most recent linux motherboard guide dates from 2006. I suspect things have changed since then.

TIA