John R Pierce (p...@hogranch.com)

'host'

note that CentOS kernel SRPMs are /not/ the full kernel source, rather,
they are a bunch of patchfiles and scripts that build the kernel from
standard sources a specific way..

Bill Campbell wrote:
> I would go with Opensolaris.  


for a dedicated production storage server, I would go with Solaris 10.   
unless there's some specific feature/capability you need thats only in
OpenSolaris.

Lanny Marcus wrote:
> And, I believe, in the Dell Dimensions, we have 4 of them, they use
> Proprietary cases, motherboards and PSUs.

not since the 90s, anyways.  at one time, Dell dimensions used PSUs with 
two wires swapped on the power connector, but they haven't done this in
a long long time.   Their P4 and newer tower systems should hold any 
standard ATX board of the right general size (micro vs mini vs full
sized, depending on the specific chassis).      Dell does like to use 
passive heatsinks powered by 120mm case fans and shrouds, this obviously
won't work if the CPU on the replacement motherboard is in a different
place, but the shroud can be removed, the case fan reversed to exhaust,
and a conventional heatsink/fan cpu cooler used instead.

out of general curiosity, I did some poking around the Nouveau project
wiki.    In short order, I learned..

A) its still highly experimental and very incomplete.

B) it has three components, a 2D driver, a 3D driver, and a kernel
driver.    you need to build all three together for your target OS.