Woot! (and rambles)

I just came back upstairs, and the xubuntu install is finished!

[presses enter to reboot]

[waits]

You know, the main disadvantage to having 320MB RAM in an old system like this is waiting so long for it to be tested, I think last time I timed it it took about 40 seconds, and that was with 256MB.

[waits more]

Woot, GRUB :D

Woot again, Xubuntu booting/loading bar! I'm just now noticing this, but the HDD activity LED on the front of the GX1 doesn't appear the be blinking. Odd...

Yay, at the login prompt now! It's funny when your OS starts faster than your RAM tests. I remember when I ran BeOS on this (still do, actually) it took about a minute to boot to the usable desktop, and only the last eight seconds or so was actual BeOS.

[logs in to xubuntu]

Xubuntu 8.04 looks really nice, now that I'm on my home LAN and I have crap deleted off the athlon (I had like 30GB of dupes, lol) I might go for dual boot.

Ok, logged in w/ loaded desktop. Grrr. I can't get more than 800x600@32 on this. I know this video chip & vram can do 1024x768@32. Alas, XFCE4 at 800x600 looks pretty nice honestly. Time to check for updates! ... Woo, updates installing!

Okay while those install I'm going to ramble for a moment. First off I've decided that I need to start tagging my blog posts. Not to make them easier to find or categorize, but because all the cool kids are doing it these days. Weather or not I'm going to go back to all my previous posts and tag them is unclear, but certainly all my future posts will be tagged.

That was enough rambles for one paragraph, and my updates just finished downloading, so while they actually install I'm going to move the my music library off the thinkpad onto the Athlon, because I like having synced libraries. Augh, crap. The thinkpad did the thing again where when I RDP into it from the athlon, it turns off it's internal screen and won't turn it back on unless I force reboot it... *Grumble*

I am, however, becoming incredibly intrigued by the idea of putting Xubuntu on the athlon now though. The last time I tried was when I was in Richmond, and if I remember right the main reason I was turned off by it was because there is only mediocre support for my wifi card in linux. But here at home I'm connected to the straight up gig-e switch, so things are different. I still won't have amazingtastic video drivers or whatever, but all my games are in windows anyways so who cares.

Blarg these updates are taking forever. I think what I'm just going to do is finish this post now, and then slap xubuntu on the athlon. Yeah.

Later Gators.

still going...

So it's been about 45 minutes, and Xubuntu is /still/ installing. I gave up on FreeDOS in QEMU (for now?) but would like to see this work. It's probably going so slow because of the HDD I put in it, a random 6.5GB IBM something-or-other.

Will write more as things happens...

So, blah.

Apparently today is Sunday and yesterday was Saturday, meaning that today is still Sunday and the library isn't open on Sunday so I can't do what I was planning on doing today, which was go to the library and pay my thee cent fine, and then either read, or bask in the air conditioning and play with my iPod Touch, or Thinkpad, depending if I brought the thinkpad. But again as I said, neither of my local libraries are open Sundays, the one that's like, twenty miles away might be, but I don't want to ride my rikety old bike on hw264.

So, instead of that I'm sitting here at home, blagging on the athlon, installing FreeDOS in QEMU and Xubuntu 8.04 on the Optiplex. After I do that maybe I'll get some lunch/breakfest, or find something else to do. I'd ride my bike around but it's way too hot to go on a just for fun bikeride. Mom and I will probably take a walk down by the waterfront later though, that's always nice.

No luck.

Well unfortunately I can't get any of the floppy based drivers to work with either the pcmcia CD drive or ethernet card, so I'm going to go back to playing with the optiplex. Interestingly enough the the 3rd RAM slot in that thing seems to be working, or at least partly, so I'm going to play around with getting three 128s going in it.

Plus when lando moves into ECU in a weekish or so, he's giving me his old GX1, it's basically the same as mine except it has a fancy adaptec SCSI card and two ueberfast SCSI drives, and I think it's a newer mobo revision.

That's all for now, but expect at least three or more blog posts today. I'm really enjoying doing this multiple times a day.

More debian and toshiba

Well my little pcmcia nic didn't seem to be recognized, so I busted out my trusty and never really used IBM pcmcia CD drive. I tested it with an audio CD first and it works fine. Now to see if debian will like it. Only time will tell!

Debian & Toshiba

So after cleaning my room, I've had all this extra space to do stuff, which has been great. Most recently I've been playing with my GX1, but I think that's on the brink of death, and there's only so much amazing stuff you can do with BeOS. So, I dug out my fancypants 486 toshiba laptop. It's one of the sweet gray ones, with 16MB RAM and a 500MB HDD. This one is a little bit beat up, but I decided to try and get debian on it. Obviously it doesn't have a CD drive, so I dug out three high density floppies, my pcmcia 10baseT card, and fired it up. As I type this I've just finished loading the drivers floppy, so we now to get to see if it likes my ethernet card or not.

Here's proof it works:



I'll update more as I work with it.

Cleaning & School

I've always found that I'm most productive in a clean and relatively tidy environent, so I decided that before the school semester started, I'd give my room a throuogh cleaning over. I got rid of a ton of old broken hardware as well as three trash bags worth of old papers and smaller junk. I also moved a lot of my older and less used equipment into my sister's old room, things like monitors and a spare desk. I also used the opprotunity of a clean and open floor to rearrange some furniture. The most noticeable thing I did was move one of my desks to be at a 90deg angle directly next to my main desk, so now when I'm I'm my fancy new swivle chair I can easily move from one to the next, so I can work ok two computers more easily or whatever. Right now I have my dell gx1 set up there running BeOS, very cool. All I have left to clean now is the closet, and it's not that bad.

Also my futon is still out of service due to crappy frame construction, which is lame. Alternatively however, it allows me to experience something very new- sleeping with the futon directly on the floor! It's very hard to get used to at first, but it is a lot nicer than that frame. Most notably because it's more stable, obviously. One lame thing is that it's a little too low for my fan to be pointed at directly, but that's not a huge problem because I recentlybgot a new box fan pulling air in from my front window so it's a lot cooler in here. I also just bought my world civ and English books off abe, got some great deals- saved about $90 combined! Hopefully they get here before the semester starts, whee.

And wow, this whole post was tapped out on my iPod Touch, incredibly intense!