Things have been pretty mellow these past few days.
Over the weekend we barely left the house. I spent some time on Saturday downloading Solaris 10 for x86 to toss on one of our spare machines, only to discover that the old, lousy video cards in both our spare x86 machines are old and unsupported. I shelved that project until I get a supported card and Michael gave me some disks for other OSes to try.
I succeeded in getting BeOS 4.5 installed on our old Dell server, which was fun for about 20 minutes. Of course installing it was not with the intention of actually using it, or even learning how to use it (no reason to, it’s dead) but more for the historical (in?)significance. As others have said, it was a pretty decent looking unix-based OS for it’s time (1999), especially compared to its Linux sisters. Installing was a breeze. I am not as sure about functionality though, again the old graphics card wasn’t fully supported (black, grey and white BeOS – woo!). The NIC wasn’t supported either, so I couldn’t fully try out any of their networked apps. Oh and there were plenty of jokes about the lack of programs for the OS, so taking out networked apps and those that needed a supported graphics card (like Quake 2), there wasn’t much to play with.
One of my next projects might be getting a NetBSD machine running. Considering the popularity of the BSD family it is surprising that I’ve never even tried to install it anywhere.
I also spent some time up in the Magic Room organizing and reading some of the fantasy book my father was working on before he died. It’s been on my mind a lot this week, there are certainly some great qualities about the manuscript (which is close to 100 pages) and some things that need a lot of work. I haven’t decided if I’m going to take on the chore of continuing his work, but I am going to try to devote some time to typing up the entire thing so I have it in more than just paper form.
The next couple weekends will be reasonably busy. We’re getting together with a friend we haven’t seen in a couple months on Friday night for dinner. Saturday we’re planning on heading out to the jeweler to discuss our wedding ring options (glee!). Then we’ll be doing some shopping for camping supplies so we’re fully prepared for the Gaian Mind Festival we’re heading out to Central PA for next weekend (so excited!).
Tonight we’re eating hot dogs made from bison meat. That is all.