To be honest, when I bought the bits for this PC, I was expecting that installing this box was going to be a nightmare and I’d have a horrific tale to tell of cross-compiling kernels and generally getting my hands dirty. Fortunately, none of this turned out to be necessary, I downloaded the latest version of Fedora (8 at the time), put the DVD in the drive and installed it like any other computer. Good job Fedora!

That said, I did want to make sure that the computer was as quiet as possible. Although the hard drive is the only moving part, that can still seem like a lot of noise when you’re trying to get to sleep.

The first job is to get the hard drive to spin down. There’s loads of useful information out on the web about this, I found this one particularly handy:  http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/SpinDownUSBHarddisks I found the hdparm technique worked for me, I set the drive to spin-down after 30 minutes.