AMCD computing page

"dawes" - 12" Apple PowerBook G4, circa 2005

This computer has been great. It was purchased in the fall of 2005 shortly after the end of usable life on my iBook. In the words of Ferris Bueller: "It's so choice, if you have the means, I highly recommend it." I realized the other day that the slick metallic case on this machine must represent a return to my computing roots. Yes indeed that is a picture of a Timex Sinclair 2068 the first computer I ever learned to program. Of course "learned to program" is a bit of a stretch since I was 3 when it came to market and maybe 5 or 6 when my parents got it. The best part was starting it reading a tape before dinner and then after dinner the game would be all loaded and ready to play (and you thought floppy drives were slow).

But I digress... the powerbook is running OS X.4.8 and whizzing along beautifully. I've played a bit with cocoa programming because it seems so easy and fun (the way it should be right). As I learn more about the platform I'm sold more and more.

"gottajibboo" - 14" Apple iBook Dual-USB, circa 2002

the computer formerly known as "ibooksan"

The hard disk got clicky and the rest is history. After about a month of random hanging in a click-whir-click cycle that indicated the death of the hard drive I've put this machine on mothballs and it has since been replaced by a powerbook g4 (see above).

Well the gentoo experience didn't make it past a couple of months. It's certainly a _different_ approach to package management, system installation and upkeep. If I had a broadband connection at home and a much faster CPU I may still be with it but the long compiles and bizarre ways were too much for my dwindling free time. I'm now running OS X (10.3) and only OS X. Fink provides what I need from the linux world and there are a growing number of open-source apps ported directly to OS X.

First of all this machine has been re-christened after a major overhaul of the operating system that took place over the end of last semester and winter break. The new name is in reference to the music that fills more than half of my ipod and mp3 libraries... live phish.

The OS X side of this three headed beast now runs 10.2.8 and that may be as far as I go. Panther is attractive only for official X11 at this point. I'm curious about GarageBand but I don't know if I'm curious enough to buy software (something I haven't done since 1995, aside from OEM inclusions).

The two remaining heads are both linux... Yellowdog on an 8G partition and Gentoo on a 5G partition. Yellowdog is as beautiful, simple and quick as redhat on any x86 machine. Everything works except there is some wierdness with ethernet vs. airport detection... no big deal. And the modem doesn't work (proprietary closed drivers).

Gentoo on the other hand is really a great experience. I've learned a major lesson too: laptop batteries are often not enough to compile things like KDE. Keep it plugged in! and if it's unplugged watch the lights on the bottom since you are really going to hate yourself when you watch the compile stop 2/3 through and the machine shut down.

I've really been impressed with the quality of support and explanation on the Gentoo pages. It's not necessarily for newbies but if you are courageous it will make you a very competant linux user by the end of it. My Gentoo experience has inspired me to start a "Gentoo on ibook" page found here and hopefully kept well updated.

There will be more updates soon, as of now, I've upgraded to 10.2.2 "Jaguar" and got it running XDarwin so I can run remote X apps from work or linlan... whichever is closer :-)

What can I say about this machine that all unix users haven't already heard, it is truely an ultimate computing package. I bought it for several reasons: a) no pc in ten years will get close to a 6 hour battery life. b) no pc I know of ships with BOTH a fully developed GUI AND a fully developed BSD distribution. It is true, I bought it for the hardware (which is insanely tight) and then promptly fell in love with OSX. It does what you want and when you want it to. Most importantly "you" is no longer restricted to rich computer-newbies trying to design t-shirts or posters or edit pictures and shell out for all software and hardware in between. Now "you" can be a regular ole poor unix geek and still do everything you want to... for the same price as a pc laptop would cost. So what you have a little eye candy to deal with... look me in the eye and tell me windows XP is manly. Not that I expect you to be running XP... I'm just sayin.

"linlan" --- DELL DIMENSION PII - 300mHz c.1998

The latest update on this machine is the mysterious death of /dev/hda at 4:15am on October 23rd. I woke up to my UPS cycling on and off of the AC power and beeping furiously in the process. Wishing to sleep and not hack I powered the machine down, noticed read/write errors on /dev/hda and promptly went back to sleep. Later that night (12+ hours later) I booted to the still-frightening warning "Operating System Not Found." Suspicions were confirmed... hda had lost it's magic smoke. Power down, pull it out, promote /dev/hdb to /hda reinstall lilo and boot up to a windows-free linux machine... I don't miss it. I can safely say I own no machine currently capable of booting windows. It's only taken me 5 years. I should note the lack of concern I expressed for the fact that somehow a hard disk failure caused my UPS to freak out and cycle on and off the main power. The only thing I could figure was an actual short within the disk. This indeed seemed to be the case given the magnitude of damage visible inside the disk case.

Backstory:

This box was my first, it felt the power of linux in the fall of 2000 with the help of Mike Wimpee who took me through the Mandrake installation and got me hooked from minute one.

I've since upgraded several aspects of this box, first-off I reinstalled mandrake about four more times until I finally learned how to not screw up the XFree86 setup (linux is the best teacher, unlimited mistake potential => unrestricted learning rate ;-)

The second change was the addition of a 1.2Gig hard drive scavanged from the local computing body (WCTS) college tech services!! This holds my grumble grumble winblows 98 distribution (yes I choke it down to a 1.2gig disk this way it knows I'm boss). Don't worry, the boot screen reads "where should you have gone today? ... Winblows2005" in referece to their lame slogan and the fact that even in 2005 windows will suck and I'll still never use it. If you want a lesson on how to change to this screen or would like a copy of the image (I'll post it soon...) let me know (e-mail)

In addition to the nice new HD space (linux all to itself) I've replaced the dying dell quietkey with an IBM Model M born 1984 and still goin strong, which is absolutely no suprise if you have been near one of these guys... "It's so choice... if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up". Seriously though folks the ultimate keyboard was built 17 years ago and nothing has touched it since. If you don't believe me go to ESR's page and find the ultimate linux box (writings section). I'm not close on anything else in his list, but the keyboard is arguably the most important part (if you code at all that is). Yes the monitor is important and yes I am saving up for a Diamond Pro 2060u... but then again... who isn't :-)

"sunlin" --- SPARCclassic 24MB-RAM, 200MB-SCSI-HD

The story has stopped with sunlin, in order to move from Walla Walla WA to Durham NC I had to "lighten ship" which meant selling sunlin off to a fellow linux geek at Whitman (Eric Bott) in order to be sure it found a good home. Fortunately there is a surplus store for Duke here and they keep it well stocked with aging computer hardware. Now if I only had the kind of free time I had in college, ha.

This box is another "donation" from WCTS, what are they going to do with a SPARCclassic... give it to some elementary school... ha. It has (in the last week) been updated to run linux kernel 2.4.2 under a _very_ sparse SuSE distribution. The X-Server (Xsun24) and associated files are NFS-ed from linlan (see above) on boot so I saved about 30MB from that. It currently has 43MB free of ~200. Which is enough to run all sorts of fun stuff especially since I can X-remote from linlan as well as ssh over in sunlin's beautiful console mode (SPARC has a very graphical console mode for those who are uninitiated) and take advantage of the highly superior keyboard layout Sun Type 5. It's a toss up between clicky-feel Model M on linlan and ultimate layout on sunlin. I'll get around to re-mapping linlan one of thse days.

"conlin" --- Compaq Contura 486/20 100MB-HD 4MB-RAM

Unfortunately, this guy was left behind as well, not that there was anything left of value, perhaps some lucky linux geek will happen across it in the blue mountain thrift store in Walla Walla and pick up where I left off. In all likelyhood it will still be there next time I come through town.

The story is just starting on this guy. I've got a bootable small linux distribution on it now but since the battery is completely shot the only thing it's good for is living-room linux (which is where sunlin is now so...). The poor thing doesn't boot much since the project was mostly "because I can." I'll get something figured out for it but for the time being it simply serves as