Updates, updates everywhere. I pushed a bunch of updates to FreeLinuxBox.org, my Blog, LinuxPlanet Casts and Blogs, LinuxForChristians, TLLTS Planet and the Lincware forums. Everything looks ok right now, but please let me know if you see anything strange happening (or not happening as the case may be). Thanks and you may now return to your previously scheduled rss feed.
FreeLinuxBox
That being said, there are a LOT of people out there who would love some tech themselves but just can’t afford it. I say, let’s compromise! Do yourself and others a favor by cleaning out your old computer inventory and putting it up on FreeLinuxBox. You can make some room (and a good excuse) for getting your new whizbang laptop while simultaneously giving the gift of a working Linux computer to someone who could really use it. Don’t wait or hesitate. Do it now and you’ll be glad you did.
You may be thinking that nobody wants your old junk, but let me assure you that is not the case. I just recently put up an old used laptop with a bad display and I had several people emailing me asking for it within mere hours. Unfortunately, I had to turn them all down but the one who got it. They are waiting for you to post yours now.
It’s really simple. Get your old computer out, the one that you were saving for your kids when they get old enough, or the one you were holding on to for that special project you will never do. Install Linux or BSD on it and make sure it works. Write down the specifications of the machine like make/model/ram/hdd etc. and post them on FreeLinuxBox. It only takes a few minutes and you can be making someone really happy with their new Linux/Unix toy within just a few hours.
This is the final chapter in the saga of my broken Thinkpad T23.
Many of you know that I have been using my T23 for testing distributions lately, and before that for a headless server. The reason for that is that the machine has this flaky video problem where sometimes it works, sometimes it does not and other times it “sort of” works. As you can imagine, that is not very conducive to testing out desktop distributions. I certainly has been problematic lately.
I have been lamenting what to do with this especially this month as I have been trying to generate some content for the blog. How am I to do distro testing and such without a desktop machine to test on? The solution came the other day in an email from an old LUG member.
It seems that Stuart, a member of my old LUG, who’s mailing list I am still subscribed to, had a couple spare laptops he was offering up. He posted them to the list and I just happened to be watching my email when the post went through. I jumped at the chance to replace my old beater with something almost as old but fully functional. I arranged to go pick up my new(old) machine that very night.
For a measly $25 and 4 hours worth of drive time I picked up a nice little Thinkpad X31. It has 1.5gb of ram, 120gb hdd, internal wireless B and G and will make a great little laptop to do multitudes of testing on. It even came with Windows 7.
Now I didn’t keep Windows on the laptop, in fact it got a clean Linux install the second it hit my house, but on the way home, I did get a change to check out W7 a little bit. Honestly, I think XP was windows done in crayon and 7 is windows done in maybe sharpie or something. In my opinion, Windows 7 is trying very hard to be a rip-off of OS X, except they have this cartoonish interface. It’s not very professional looking (to me anyway) and I can tell you for sure that Linux on the same machine completely blows it out of the water. In two words, I found it cartoonish and clunky.
Just to tantalise you a little, since I brought the machine home I have attempted to install 5 concurrent distributions on it and actually put 2 of them on. I also learned a lot in the process about Grub 2, but all that is for a different post on a different day, so keep watching and reading!
Short post today. More of a memorial post than anything else I guess.
As if on queue, my thinkpad laptop has realized that I have been using it and has decided to make with the funny video problems once again.
This sort of puts a damper on my rolling distribution reviews as it was quite convenient for me to run them on that laptop and I really don’t have anything else that’s comparable.
Perhaps it’s time to switch tactics a little and do some book reviews? We shall see… In the mean time I think the T23 will end up on freelinuxbox.org, so keep watch there for this historic piece of computing equipment there.
Last night I finally finished cutting all my server services to their new residence on Pukwudgie (my spectacular CentOS 5.3 based server VM). I turned off my old Thinkpad server, which has been doing the job reliably for over 2 years, rebooted pukwudgie just to make sure everything starts up correctly unattended and that was that. My first impressions are that everything seems to run faster. I really expected that, though, because there are a lot more resources available to Pukwudgie than there were to the old server. I am loving it so far and it sure is nice to have an up-to-date server. The old server was running Ubuntu 6.10, which was so old I couldn’t even get security patches for it anymore and this new CentOS server is completely current.
Hopefully this is a move for the better, and I can probably offer the old lappy/server on FreeLinuxBox.org too!
In between bouts of making Linc’s World Famous Potato Soup, I had a few minutes to do some catch-up coding today on FreeLinuxBox. It desperately needed an rss feed, so that is what I coded up. How else are you supposed to know there is new stuff there right? Well, all finished and added the feed to LinuxPlanet.org, which you should be subscribing to if you aren’t already 
If you are just looking for the FLB feed, you can find it at http://freelinuxbox.org/rss/rss.php.
Speaking of Free Linux Boxes, Russ, The Techie Geek, was the latest person to put a box up on FLB and he has a GREAT idea. He wants local pickup (because of weight no doubt), but he said he’d be wiling of delivering to the Ohio Linux Fest. Outstanding idea. If you, like me, have some boxes you are putting off giving out because of the hassle in shipping, perhaps following Russ’ example could be the answer!
With the help of RFQuerin, the internet’s own Open Source graphics master, I have updated the logo merchandise stores for The Linux Link Tech Show, Free Linux Box, and Linux Planet. It’s all great stuff so check them out and support a project by flying it’s colors on a T-shirt or maybe even a coffee mug. We don’t make a dime off this stuff, strictly publicity and it’s real nice to see someone at a conference wearing a T with a logo of a project your are involved with too!
http://cafepress.com/tllts
http://cafepress.com/freelinuxbox
http://cafepress.com/linuxplanetorg
A few people have asked about a way to make a donation to help with the costs here on any of the lincgeek.org sites (tllts.org, linuxforchristians.org, linuxplanet.org, freelinuxbox.org, etc). Since it’s time to re-up for another years worth of bandwidth and *I’m broke* I figured it’d be as good a time as any to put up a paypal donation button. You can find it at http://lincgeek.org. If you can see fit to help out at all, you get my eternal thanks and a promise for me to keep things going on my end