I have been running Fedora for a number of years and have decided that for my mailserver system (which doubles as a small time web server) I want to go to an OS that has a supported lifespan of more than a year, especially since this machine has in the past been up longer than a year without reboots.
The machine that it will ultimately host the OS is a dual processor P3 machine with 2GB of RAM (the machine was free and is normally running idle so cpu isn't an issue), I also plan on (continuing to) running software RAID 1 on this system. So I'm not rushed into an install I plan on installing the OS on different hardware
My questions are several.
1) The build hardware is only a single processor with 768MB of memory (also a P3) what if anything will I need to do to enable the second processor? (I'll make provisions for a larger swap space at build time) 2) The build hardware won't have a second disk usable for RAID, is it possible to build the RAID as degraded during the install? Or am I better off building it as a non RAID system and transfer everything to a RAID disk later? 3) The system bios will allow me to boot off the network, can I do an install from that boot? there is no CD/DVD reader in the box, nor is there a floppy drive. USB (flash?) may possible, but it is USB1.0 (1.1?) and quite slow and I'm not 100% positive the BIOS will support booting from a USB device.
Any other caveats to be aware of? My experience with linux has been several Fedora (core) releases some Redhad releases prior to that, and many many many years ago slackware (when the install was a stack of diskettes!)
TIA,
Jeff