Well, it's built and up and running with Ubuntu 12.04.
I count that as a major result for me, and wish to thank everyone who replied to my queries.

Having got all of the components together, I can see, in retrospect (but only in retrospect) that assembly is made relatively easy for us these days. I can also see that it could become quite more-ish.

Good job. Building PCs is easy, it's just trouble shooting faults if or when something goes wrong. That can be a bit of a nightmare, especially if you don't have a back up device to connect to the internet to ask for HELP!

And in the rare event a hardware component is either faulty or otherwise has an incompatibility problem, it can be very hard proving faults if you don't have a back up machine or component to test them in. Thankfully, that's extremely rare though.

Brave of you to go for Ubuntu I think. Not having any experience with Linux I'm not sure if that makes things harder or easier than sticking Windows on your new PC. Makes sense though.

Have you taken a pics of your nice new machine yet? If you enjoy gaming you could always add a nice new graphics card to that (and Windows of course). Then you'll really get a sense of all that power under the hood of your shiny new case.

Edited by deleted (Wed 27-Jun-12 18:08:11)

I chose Ubuntu specifically to avoid Windows. I have never been a Windows user, except briefly five years ago when I did an OU course and their online stuff required it at that time - don't know about now. Anyway, I set up Boot Camp, got Windows XP and had a nightmare of a time with it. Can't remember details - just the feeling of despair.
Plus, Ubuntu is free! I quite like what I've seen so far. I won't be doing anything other than Folding@home, which I now have up and running after a goodly amount of help from the F@H forums. That is another high bar to clear. I've found that nothing about F@H is intuitively obvious. I had to have help getting it running on my iMac in the first place.
I will say that my new machine is fast, and some. There will be faster ones out there, I know, but compared to my Intel iMac, it just chews the WUs up at an incredible rate.
I think I was lucky to have had such an easy ride with all this. Lots of help and advice online. No component failure during and after building the machine. I am at the place I wanted to be. Eventually I want to disconnect and put away the monitor, keyboard and mouse - and internally disconnect the optical drive to save some electricity. 'Headless' - is that what they call it? Then I'll try and get to grips with ssh - am I using the correct terminology?
I haven't taken any pics. I'm loath to be considered to be blowing my trumpet too loudly because it's fairly simple build as things go.
I've never been a gamer, so a graphics card isn't on the horizon. I suppose I'm very humdrum basically, but I now have exorcised this bee from my bonnet.

Post deleted by billford

Advertising is not permitted.

Bill, slightly off-topic, but did you make any decisions about F@H?

I've decided that (almost certainly) I'll have a go at it, it was contributory to recently maxing out the RAM on the iMac to 16GB.

But it'll have to wait until I've got a bit more time, I've been thoroughly sidetracked by real life () in the last few weeks, including arranging for the back garden to be landscaped at a [gulp] amount of money- terracing the slope and nearly 200m² of Indian sandstone doesn't come cheap

I've got this thread bookmarked, I'll come back when I've got any comments (or, more likely, questions ).