I am interested in purchasing some cheap PC (e.g., wal-mart special) to use for a server. Is there anything special I would need to do to boot up Fedora on such a device, with no monitor, keyboard, or mouse attached? (I know the monitor and mouse should not be a problem, but in the past I've seen machines that wouldn't pass POST without a keyboard).
I did get one of the Wal-mar pcs, a $200 1.2Ghz Duron. I believe they're manufactured by MicroTech. I bought it to test various Linux and *BSD distributions, and Fedora installed just fine on it.
The disk was pretty small and slow, and the video card is terribly slow. My aged 300Mhz Dell has much better video performance. Since you're intending to use the machine as a server, you probably don't care about video performance, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.
If you like, I'll see if I have any problems booting the machine w/out a keyboard when I get home tonight and let you know.
One more thing, I ended up buying a larger and faster disk and putting more memory in it. I wonder if I'd spent the additional money I paid for the disk and memory on a machine from a better manufacturer I might have gotten a better machine than what I ended up with. There are some pretty decent looking machines in the $350 price range it seems.
Peter
