Words are inadequate

Well, ordinarily I'd make a post about it, but that's kinda complicated, so I'll lay it all out here:

I decided to build a Linux machine, sort of as a testbed for trying out different OSes and things. So, I went out on Saturday and spent about $600 (got a check for some freelance work I did) on parts: a motherboard, a chip (Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz), 4 gigs RAM, a 500 gig drive, and a mini-ITX case. Put it all together, and it works pretty well (once I figure out a problem I had with the heat sink).

Only trouble is, I have no OS on there, and since I didn't get an optical drive, I couldn't install one. See, Ubuntu doesn't distribute pre-made USB images any more, just CD images with instructions on how to convert them.

This is the point I was at when I made that comment: I had followed the directions but still couldn't get the machine to boot from USB, so I was going crazy looking up what in the BIOS was keeping it from seeing the USB drive as bootable. See, if you search for pretty much any problem imaginable on a particular motherboard, someone's had that problem on that board, so you'll find confirmation that it can happen and think it's probably happening to you.

Of course, it wasn't happening to me at all, I figured out later: the reason it wouldn't boot from USB is because the image I had burned to that USB stick wasn't bootable. Ubuntu assumes that whatever machine you're preparing the image on is the machine you'll be installing it to, so it was giving me instructions on how to make a USB drive that would boot a Mac. The next issue is, there is no way to make a USB image that will boot a PC, using only a Mac. None. No Ubuntu tool (theirs is only Windows and Ubuntu), no third-party tool (UNetbootin is Windows / Linux only), no Apple tool (Open Firmware will boot from pretty much anything, so the tools they provide for making a boot image don't have to be very complex). If all you have is a Mac, and you want to boot a PC from USB, then, well, tough. You can't.

So, what do? I could go buy a DVD drive, but I couldn't, because slimline drives are really hard to find: nobody in Houston has them and is open on Sunday (actually, only one place has them, and they're an OEM supplier that closes at 5:30 on weekdays, so totally out). I could borrow a drive from someone and just run it without the case, but from who? And then do what next time I do this? The whole point of this machine was to play with lots of different OSes.

Remember, I can't just get any old drive because this computer is the size of a toenail. There was barely any room in the case before I put the parts in; a standard-size optical drive will never fit in there. And to complicate things ever further the board only does SATA.

What I did was go spend $70 on an external USB CD drive. See, even though it won't boot a CD image from a USB stick the thing will perfectly normally boot off a USB CD drive. And now I have a portable DVD drive for watching DVDs on the MacBook Air if I'm on a road trip.