Saturday, March 06, 2010

The Great Linux Experiment

280px-Tux-linux_logo.svgOk, maybe it won’t be so “great” but I’m hoping that it will be useful  to someone besides just me, in my case so far I’m rather surprised, but more on that later; most likely, later posts, I suspect that this is going to turn into multiple posts, if not an ongoing thing.

So, what’s the deal?  Well, a lot of you probably know that the Windows 7 demo expired after last weekend, at the end of February.  I few days before that I started looking around the house realizing that I’ve accumulated quite a few machines, all of which were happily buzzing along with the Windows 7 pre-release. 

One was my work laptop, that one isn’t a problem, that got a corporate copy.  Another is the i7 desktop, which was specifically ordered a few hours into the first day that a free Windows 7 when it comes out upgrade was offered (I will note I’m still waiting to get my upgrade for this machine… 3-5days has turned into 2 and a half weeks now)

My wife’s laptop… well I think that should get a memory upgrade and Windows 7… but my thoughts there are falling on deaf ears.  I’m pretty much ignored there until the machine breaks, then get paid attention to for as long as it takes for me to come up with a way to recover the data on it.  Oh well…

The rest of the machines aren’t so clear cut. 

2 of them are just small, old laptops, function wise not much more than netbooks.  One an X40 Thinkpad with 1gb ram, and the other a similar dell with 1.25GB ram (as 256mb mounted on the motherboard).  They basically get dropped in random places around the house and are used to RDP into whatever actually has the ability to do what I want to do, or to check up on other machines.

There is one more laptop, again, roughly the same age, a T series Thinkpad with 2GB ram in it.  That one lives in the family room because it’s the only machine I own with an S-video out, which is easy to hook up to a composite input on the TV (if I’m using the projector setup I can use SVGA…).  Yea, it’s old tech but it’s just not _that_ important to me… eventually we’ll get a newer TV, but there is no rush there.  So this machine really as no reason for existing beyond being a movie box.

Then there is one more that I care about, an old desktop with, are you ready for this, ok, here it comes, a P4 and 512MB (before anyone says anything, all of these machines went through XP, Vista and 7 iterations, and this machine was fine and quite useable for what it was).  This one sort of replaced my old domain controller/file server as the “everything I don’t want to tie up a machine that I will actually work at” machine.  I use it for torrents, it has a few external drives hanging off of it making it a file/media server, it runs some auction sniping software and assorted other noise.  Oh, and this is my connection from the outside world, I route RDP connections in to this box so if I need something from home when I’m not here that is my way in.

(Next up: The Rules of Engagement)

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