HI SYN!

Ubuntu: Thursday

So far so good. This is basically the half way point of this short-holiday week and since work is crazy busy I haven't been able to post about how it goes. My test system is as follows: AMD 3200XP 768MB DDR1 Memory 80GB IDE Harddrive Nvidia FX5200 Graphics Card Onboard Sound Ideq Case (and mini-PSU) Gnome feels very responsive for such a 'slow' system and initially I wasn't using the accelerated X video driver ad though the system was half decent so I'm guessing with the right video card this setup would be fine on a Pentium 3! So far it's been pretty much eye opening as the last time I used Gnome, everything was heavy feeling and very slow. It seems unlike Microsoft, the coders actually optimized code over time - oh my, what a unique idea! ;) For me, using Linux on the desktop again has been great, and thus far I feel like I am much more productive for work in this environment. Speaking of work, it's calling so until later today!

The CentOS switch

I feel like I've done something incredibly stupid now, yesterday I decided 'hey lets switch the fileserver to CentOS' . The reasons I decided to switch away from BSD on my fileserver was so I could be on the same platform as work and I actually like this OS for a server. I made the call the other day to eventually have all servers for work (currently around 25worldwide) switched over to CentOS from Fedora Core and RedHat 9. CentOS is just RHEL (Redhat Enterprise Linux) stripped of all mention of Redhat and all other trademark content removed. I gotta say, this is what I remember linux being like. Stupid me though decides to change the OS on a 1.5TB fileserver over without actually making sure Linux can read AND write to a UFS2 filesystem.... definitely my bad. I stupidly thought linux would support reading and writing to that filesystem so I could leave the RAID array alone. Oh well, another 3 hours till a 600GB data transfer is done and I can get cracking on the reinstall.

The time for change has come...

I decided to finally make some time to play around with alternative OSes again and possibly start running one as my main OS platform. I've been meaning to do it for over a year now, but always had something 'more important to do'. Recently though, I've had a desire to help out on an alternative OS project that suits my needs and desires, or at the very least run an alternative OS since in Microsoft Windows world the cost to run this platform is increasing and so is the computer power required to run it. While there was a time a place for a commercial OS that required bi-yearly updates that required you to buy the OS each time, that time has passed. I believe the OS should be free, or at the very least open. By being open it allows people to modify and work on the OS to suit their own purposes, be it commercial, work related or just personal geek reasons. My biggest desire is for the OS to be CPU speed independent. The base OS responsiveness shouldn't show any major difference in performance if you have a Pentium II or a Core 2 Duo. Applications, games in particular, are a different story. The OS should also be easy to use and allow me to easily add a new piece of hardware, even temporarily, without having to reboot the computer numerous times to install the driver or force me dig through the filesystem to find out where the driver for the newly acquired hardware should be placed. A larger order would be complete hardware independence. A dream of mine is to have a 1GB chip with the entire OS + most of my vital data on the chip and be able to plug it into any computer I go up to and boot into *my* system from there. Pretty tall order, but I like to aim high.