More Ubuntu
June 27th, 2006 | by Todd W |The Ubuntu saga continues.
My basement looked like a computer graveyard this past week while on vacation. My primary PC, as I had mentioned, is strewn all over the desk in a tangle of cables, drives and panels. I’ve pulled my drive cages and have three loose drives sitting on the table, wired into the system. My bios cooling fan popped off and now dangles from the motherboard (no idea what happened there). And I’ve scavenged a couple of case fans temporarily to jury rig a cooling modification to my TV cabinet (we have to keep the doors sealed to keep the kids out of the DVD/TIVO compartment, and the TIVO has started to throw warning messages about overheating. So a couple of fans, and old CPU power supply, and a Dremel left me with an intake and exhaust fan back there).
Next to the primary, the secondary has been dismantled and shelved in pieces for the time being. I left the file system on the drives intact for reassembly if needed. That freed up a monitor for my primary, so now I have the coveted dual screen setup working in Linux.
Off to the left (appropriately), I have an older iMac loaned to me by Chris Garrett. The slot-loading drive on the iMac no longer works, so I took the Mac apart and extracted the drive to see what I could do with it. As a PC man, I have to say I was impressed with the construction of the Mac. It is impressive, if you are happy with never having to crack the case and install a component. As I like to tinker, the Mac wouldn’t make me happy.
I searched for a replacement drive on-line, but couldn’t find anything less than $90, and that was for a ROM drive! And, of course, Apple has their own specially sized drive to fit this little, tiny space. I did manage to reinstall the OS by booting through a standard CD drive plugged into the ribbon cable, but the system can’t be reassembled like this.
I was in geek heaven. At one time, I had two PCs, a Mac and a laptop running as I updated software, shuffled files, and configured the core of my home network (going to build a server).
Before the week ended, I installed Ubuntu on my laptop and now have a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP. I can’t give up XP completely, not when I use the laptop for so many things out in the world. After spending a good hour trying to figure out how to get my WiFi chip to hook to my router under Linux, I’m certainly convinced I need the XP option in case I have the same problem with a strange wireless node.
The Linux experience is fascinating. It’s like learning about PCs all over again. Bash, VI, apt-get, KDE and Gnome: it’s a new world. Sure, it is taking me longer to do things, but I’m having a blast doing it.
Am I wasting time better spent on the writing passion? Probably. I really appreciated the fine comments recently about my potential and my use of time. It was flattering, particularly when I view myself as some pathetic slackard who can’t seem to get anything done.
But I’m having a lot of fun with this, and I’ll be keeping at it for a little while longer. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up writing, but there is another project that intices me right now (and a few of you know what I’m talking about). So this isn’t exactly wasted time. Not yet.
But it could easily get there.
