Michael spent some time this weekend working with eon, the little Sparc32 and HK-47, the SGI O2 we received as a wedding present. Eon is running Debian Sarge and set up with the proper Perl modules to run my irssi bot R2D2. The O2 is running Debian Etch and is set up for Michael to use with his ambient music radio show setup, now that it’s up and running with the SoundBlaster card. Very nice.
Eon is now on my desk, under my monitor.
As for me right now, I just stumble upon crappy x86 machines that need homes ;)
The last one I aquired, an old 366mhz Dell laptop, bit the dust this past week. We were able to salvage some of the pieces for use in my slightly younger Dell laptop. My test box R2Q5 has been acting up as well. So this week when a co-worker asked me if I wanted her old computer I said “sure!” All I knew about it was that she bought it “about 6 years ago.”
So I brought it home on Thursday night. I plugged it in and booted it up (just to see if it would work). It had Windows 98 installed. It loaded up the background image on the desktop – which looked horrible and made me slightly concerned that the onboard graphics card was toasted. I couldn’t do much with the computer because I quickly discovered that while the mouse worked fine, the keyboard didn’t. Rather than keeping myself up half the night trying to sort out what other problems this monster of an old HP machine had I decided to leave it to this weekend.
On Friday I asked my co-worker whether she ever had problems with the keyboard, she said “No, but the mouse didn’t work toward the end.” I figured, one of the PS2 ports was dead.
First I tried the LiveCD of Edgy, since I had it around. The machine didn’t like that much, it froze up before completing the launch of the installer. Then I found my Breezy CD and popped that in for a normal text install just to get it running and assess what I had. The Breezy install took about 40 minutes.
Once booted into Ubuntu, I was happy to discover the graphics card was fine – better than fine, the default resolution was at 1152×864 – not bad at all for an old onboard card! Windows 98 probably had a zillion viruses and other wonderful things that make it look so bad. It’s a 533mhz box, 128M ram, 40 gig harddrive. Aside from that faulty PS2 port, everything was working fine with it. I think my only complaint is the form factor of the case, it’s short and fat, making it not fit very comfortably next to my more standard-sized Dell.
Now I’m just trying to figure out whether this will be my new Debian test box (we certainly don’t need another production box around!) or if I’m going to keep R2Q5 around for that. I love R2Q5, but he’s certainly got his share of issues, weird behavior of the ethernet card and cdrom which are no doubt both due to the motherboard going bad. It does have the added bonus of an AGP slot, which this new HP lacks, but the HP has a CDR! Yes, I could put the CDR into R2Q5, but the weird behavior of the cdrom extends to ANY cdrom I put into it, wouldn’t be fun for it to die in the middle of writing a CD.
Ah computers.