I brought the March 2008 edition of Computer Shopper as it had an article about self build computers. That article, although interesting was not especially relevant to my project, however that magazine did have a very interesting article about the Linux operating system Ubuntu.

This really caught my attention as was umm-ing and ahh-ing about whether to use XP or Vista in my build. The Linux article caught my imagination as I had heard good things abut Linux, and in addition – it is free!!!

I didn't want to install anything on what was now our only working computer, for fear of damaging it, as money was quite short at that particular time. I decided that I would scour EBay and the small-ads for a cheap working computer that did not necessarily have an operating system installed, that I could install Ubuntu on and have a play before making a final decision about whether to go down the Linux route for our new machine.

After a week on so of searching I found a suitable computer advertised in the local paper. It was a very old machine with a Pentium III processor and a 10Gb hard Disk. I went round, had a look and agreed to the asking price of £10.

I played around with it for a long time, however the main problem I had was that I could not connect it to the internet. The problem was that my broadband connection is via a modem for which I could not find Linux driver. For that reason I decided to abandon (for now) any ideas about running Linux as a primary operating System.