Personal entropy field claims another victim

My dual AMD Linux box seems to have finally died. I had rescued it not too long ago with an Ubuntu install, but this morning it disappeared from the network, nothing could be seen on the display, and rebooting it failed (the BIOS won’t even get to the point of spinning the floppy drive). This machine has had a recent history of hardware flakiness (like, it can’t power up the disks fully when starting up cold: you have to start it up so the disks start spinning, then switch off the power, then switch it back on again while the disks still have momentum).

I’ve had this computer for nearly five years, and it’s serviced me well. This was the first PC I built myself, cobbled together from parts laying around, with a new motherboard, CPUs, and memory. It’s gone through a few hard drives in the meantime.

So, the answer to this problem is likely “spend some money.” I was curious as to what the lazyweb thought was a good way to put together a Linux server system today. I’d like to run Ubuntu, mostly because I don’t want to waste time dealing with anything more complicated. The primary use for this system would be Linux development and testing.

My ideas:

  1. Buy a new Core Duo Mac Mini, and use that as my new Mac desktop. My current (G4 PPC) Mac Mini would live again as a Linux server. That’s nice, because I could use a more powerful Macintosh, but I’m not sure what special kind of pain in the ass it will be to install Linux on this. The cost would be around $800, I guess (I’ll never buy a Macintosh with less than 1GB of RAM, ever).
  2. Buy a simple Dell (dude, you’re etc. etc.) and put Linux on it. This means an additional $600, and I’ll still be stuck with my current, slow Mac Mini.
  3. Buy some other system besides Dell. Bonus points if there is no resident copy of Windoze, because I don’t want Microsoft to get a dime from me, even by proxy, if I can help it.

I don’t want to build a system from scratch. The most work I’m willing to do is plug it in, temporarily hook up a keyboard and display, and install Ubuntu. From then on it’s all SSH.