It took me days and days and days and I won't bother writting down all the great minutae (like the IDE/kernel problems and the broken floppy drive and the bad NIC and the syntax error in the firewall script and so much more) that I went through, but I've finally built my new linux bawx:

Chip: AMD 850 Mhz Thunderbird
Mobo: Asus A7V133
RAM: 256 MB PC-133
Screen: Hack brand 17" (it was cheap)
Mouse: AOpen 2 button + wheel (thanks st*rm*x)
Keyboard: Happy Hacking from PFU. Yeah, the keyboard is the bomb!

Matt ssh'd into my box after he helped my sort out some of the linux hardware compatability issues, it was 4 am and I was still futzing away at the system, and he was just waking up. He was "readjusting" his hours so he could start a new job on monday. He put some firewall stuff on the machine and turned off some services. Networking was a pain, but I'm a little more familiar with the details of it on Linux now: ifconfig, ifup, ifdown and modprobe 8139too :).

Tonight I tweaked my GNOME/sawfish desktop, and installed a buncha stuff: Zope, postgreSQL, XChat, Opera. Wow, Opera is so fast, i love it! I used sawfish's resize-window-interactively binding to make the Opera window full screen, and moved the banner ad so it's no longer visible on the screen. The link colors needed changing - Opera sets visited links to red for some reason. Bah! Unvisited is red. Visited is blue. And link underlining sucks.