Aboriginal art
Here’s a Great Work of Aboriginal Art, courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Two (photo by Loyal Reader Number Four, I believe). Good work, mate! Crikey!
It was an eventful weekend. Loyal Reader Number Four left on Saturday afternoon and she andLoyal Reader Number Five are together in Park City, Utah for a few days with the McCulloch Women’s Clan. It sounds like they’re having a good time. We miss you, LRN4, in spite of the fact that you bought us food before you left so we won’t starve. We also miss LRN5, of course, but we don’t normally get to see her quite as often.
We got serious about the Computer on a Dime on Saturday evening. They were having a great sale at Fry’s on an AMD Athlon 64 with a decent motherboard, so I got it and the other necessary parts to make a new computer. I went slightly over budget, but still got an excellent deal on a very powerful computer. We got it put together and installed the 64-bit version of Fedora Core 5, which is my favorite Linux. It wasn’t really hard to put it together, but getting it up and running was a little more time-consuming. First, we had the jumpers for the hard drive (100 MB for fifty bucks) and the DVD burner mixed up, so we had to take them back out and get them right. We started downloading Fedora’s six CDs, and we tried to install a couple of live CD Linuxes in the meantime. Unfortunately, neither of the live CDs (Knoppix and Ubuntu) could format the hard disk. I finally decided to install (shudder) Windows (link warning: Windows sounds) to get the drive formatted. It worked, and by the time that was done, the first of the Fedora disks was available, so we immediately got rid of Windows and got the real installation going. Unfortunately, the download took overnight, so we didn’t get the whole thing installed until Sunday morning, after which we took a couple more hours to download and install all the updates.
Our goal was to make the computer “headless,” which means that it has no keyboard, monitor, or mouse. We borrowed those items from LRN4’s computer (thanks!) to get it going, and then got a VNC server installed and running properly. Now we can access the Linux box from any of the other computers just as if we were logged directly in to it. It’s truly a thing of beauty.
I started playing with Wine (the software, not the beverage!) last night. I think it’s still not ready for prime time (link warning – cheesy TV sound), but I’ll see what I can get installed and working. For those still trying to crack the Linux code, Wine is software that tries to emulate Windows on a Linux machine, allowing you to run any Windows programs you absolutely need while keeping your computer Microsoft-free. It’s a great idea that’s getting a lot of attention, but there’s still a lot of work to do.
Next up: the case mod (although probably not before we get into the new house).
Loyal Reader Number One was sick this weekend. He couldn’t go to church, so LRN2 and I went by ourselves. Fortunately, LRN1 is feeling better now. In fact, he was well enough for a heapin’ helpin’ of Hungry Man this evening. That ought to be enough proof of his complete recovery for anyone.
Time to hit the jacuzzi. See you tomorrow.