In some weeks we will get the key to our house we recently bought and I thought this was a perfect opportunity to buy a small light-power computer that I can use in the new house as a server. Currently I have my desktop running 24/7 because it also works as a simple webserver and provides me with my email wherever I am.
Yesterday I bought an Asus EEE Box PC. Unfortunately the thing came with Windows XP preinstalled on it, which was not right for the task I had it mind. I thought installing Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty (server) was going to be really easy, but when I created a bootable USB stick with the installation ISO on it, it did not get recognized by the EEE box as a boot device. I tried all the different USB mass storage device settings in the BIOS, repartitioned my USB stick to use FAT16 instead of FAT32, nothing leading to a satisfying result.
In the end I found a 1GB micro SDHC card I still had laying around, put it in the SD slot and after forcing the BIOS to force the USB boot mass storage device to “Forced FDD”, I finally got the linux boot menu I was looking for (instead of the windows xp boot screen). After I got this far, the rest was really easy and in no-time I had Jaunty up and running.
Now the only thing left is to move all server-data from my desktop computer to this new server and I will be finished completely.