Looks like the spare core-2 machine is likely down for the count. Even with the motherboard completely out of the chassis with nothing but the power supply and the power switch plugged in it seems to immediately shut down the power supply. I may give it one more shot on the possibility that it just doesn’t start properly without at least memory and video but I’m not hopeful.

I’ve started an install of Ubuntu 16.10 on ‘madhatter’ my back basement lab bench machine. This should do nicely for now. I’ll probably wind up buying some low-ish end hardware to replace the dead machine when the back lab bench area gets set up with a 3D printer. Until then this provides a decent Intel based linux machine that should meet my needs.

Once the base install is complete I need to get

• xrdp installed for easy remote UI access
• SSH installed (if not there out of the box) and configured for secure command line stuff.
• tightvnc installed mostly to see if it works better than the free version of realvnc that came pre-installed on the RPi
• samba to make files available to my windows boxes and hopefully set up for cleaner network visibility.

Hoping that this one goes smoothly. Disappointing the number of machines that have gone flaky recently.

Ubuntu install appeared to succeed. The machine was waiting at a ‘press enter to restart’ prompt when I checked on it this morning.

It is running on a WD ‘green’ drive so may be a bit slow booting. When I left it was still showing just a black screen (after dropping through a ‘how should I boot’ screen) so I’ll see tonight whether this system loaded up successfully. The machine seems ok overall as the windows 10 boot disk works fine.

I did start downloads of the Ubuntu 16 and 14 LTS releases to try tonight if the 16.10 image fails. Hoping there isn’t some incompatibility with core-2 era computers in newer Linux builds.