New Ubuntu Baby

Daddy's got a New Computer

The original machine from last summer's ubuntu project was such a nice success (typing on it now) that we decided to upgrade to a better machine. There is nothing wrong with this computer, it runs 24 hours a day without a crash - in fact has never crashed, or hung or had a virus, or got malware or anything. It does everything from manage my ipod, run the color and bw postscript laser printers, burn movies and cd's etc.

The original pc was a cobbled together Compaq EVO W6000 bought for $64 from vfxweb.com (my favourite store). I upped the ram to 2 gig, added a DVD burner and a Nvidia 7600 GT 512 mb video card and a USB 2.0 card. The whole thing was < 200 bucks. It's now the main machine at chaos basement. The only problem is hard drive space - it has a 73 gig scsi hard drive for the os and the home folder a 18gig scsi scratch disk for temp junk and a USB plug in drive for backup - now 80 gigs and to be replaced tomorrow with a 250gig one.

A good machine but time to move on up. So we went back to vfxweb (my favorite store) and purchased 2 matching 3.20 Ghz hyperthreaded Xeon processors (1 mb L2, 800 mhz bus) and then off to ebay for a bare bones dell machine with 6 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, 2 sata controllers (raid), room for 2 SATA hard disks and 2 IDE optical drives. I prefer compaq and HP to dell, they use metal and their machines just say 'quality'' while dell uses cheap plastic. But the price was right.

Added 3 gig of DDR2 ECC ram and a SATA 1.5 terabyte hard drive ($149 at tiger) and an LG DVD burner. Briefly considered putting in 1 gig sticks for a 6 gig machine but that would be excessive. Even my dual G5 mac only has 3 gig.

Next was an Nvidia 8600 GT 512mb pci express video card. Rummaging around the parts bin we added a 2 port firewire pci card and a 64 bit U320 scsi card to fill out the slots.

This project cost > 200 mainly due to the new parts. Probably $400 by the time we were though. Right now it is using a ps/2 kb and mouse and hooked to a 20" sony monitor via 5 coax to vga - later we will replace that with a larger monitor and usb kb/mouse.

Popped in the Ubuntu 8.10 CD and away we go! While we wrote this it has partitioned the hard disk and installed the files. Then it went off to the mirrors. While we let apt do its thing, one nice bit about 8.10 over earlier releases - the liveCD picked up the sony monitor a lot better. Although the monitor is capable of 1600x1200 rez at high refresh the older distros ran at 800x600 until you tweaked the configuration. This time it is running at a much higher screen resolution.

While the last bit is being done i was reading some reviews of windows 7 (really Vista SP2) and was thinking - why would i want this? Yes it has some better security (if stupid nagging is security) and a more modern mac/linux-like interface and.....ummm - can't think of anything it has that i don't have now. But it's user-friendly - or more accutately, user-annoying.

Switching from windows to ubuntu had some pain but now with a smooth running system there is no reason i can think of why i would want to return to windows world. The browser is worse, the system is annoying, it is insecure and it costs money. So far there has been nothing i did in windows that i have not been able to do in Ubuntu.

so why switch?