HI SYN!

Short and sweet: My Wii!

I got a Wii yesterday and to my surprise this is the platform I've been desiring (and trying to build myself) that fills my needs for a low power platform. Unlike the PS3, it allows image viewing off a SD card (not mention it plays music and some video playback off the SD card). I found an app called "Media Center X" a couple of weeks ago while looking around for a way to stream mp3s to a PS3 for a friend and it also works for the Wii. Once I'm able to install Media Center X on my CentOS server and give this a go I should know fairly quickly if this is truely my low power (10W-17W) killer Media Center App! more later...

Report Solider

It's live!  www.armygamingchampionships.com The first site on a nice little web hosting cluster I've been working on for work.   I'll have to report hardware configuration when I have the time.

Fsckin Exchange

If it weren't for Exchange, I would be using Ubuntu 100% of the time. At first, I thought I found a solution in Evolution but it seems their Exchange interface is a bit buggy. Other than that, it's been smooth sailing again using *nix as a desktop. It's been quite a while but nowadays there seems to be a GUI interface for nearly everything. The coolest thing I've been fooling with all week, when I've actually had time, is Nagios. I'm not sure how it slipped thru the cracks but it's definitely the most flexible monitoring solution out there, perfect cost too!

The hunt for "Legacy Free"

As some of my friends know, a huge pet peeve of mine about computers is legacy ports. So while searching for some information on Linux's bluetooth support and trying to find out what motherboards/SFF systems have bluetooth support I stumbled upon this post on Slashdot: As time goes by, more and more ports/connectors add up on my motherboards. When are we going to get ride of ps/2 buses, parallels and serial ports? So now we would have: bluetooth parallel port serial ports Serial IDE Parallel IDE Firewire ps2 buses USB -- Next ones are not on motherboards, but still...--- Analog joystick port (gameport) VGA output Audio ports Ethernet Am I missing a port? Keeping legacy ports does add cost on the systems... I wish we could go by with firewire only. Everything on firewire. HDs, modem, joystick, keyboard... Only analog output like Video and Audio would remain. BTW, most motherboards do not come with Firewire on, but I bet there must be a few out there with it. Source: Link [~half way down the page] This was made back in 2002, so I'm glad to see a bulk of people were thinking the same way I am even back then. My ideal motherboard would consist of ports for the following: - SATA2 - eSATA port - USB 2.0 - Firewire - 1Gbit NIC - Bluetooth support With possible variations containing wireless instead of the 1Gb NIC and both the NIC and wireless. This is on top of the usual CPU, memory and chipsets that go on the board. The idea here is to mimize space required, cost and power required. Power consumption is something I'm becoming more and more aware of and trying to minimize my personal power footprint for both cost and ecological reasons. And what exactly do I mean by "legacy"? Parallel Port - Original IBM PC Serial Port - Original IBM PC Game Port - Orignal IBM PC PS/2 Mouse - IBM PS/2 PS/2 Keyboard - IBM PS/2 3.5" Floppy - IBM PS/2 PATA (IDE) - Compaq (1985) PCI Slots - Intel 1992 AGP Slots - Intel 1997 The PCI Slot is the only slot I would consider okay to keep, but even then I need to look into this more, I bet you can get rid of it and survive. The AGP slot 'just' came out in 1997, and I remember that well since I saw beta boards with it on and thought it was the coolest thing since a GUI on an OS.

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!

Ubuntu: The experiment

So, it's been around 8 years since I've actually used an OS other than Windows for anything more than a server. Yet here I am, typing this on a freshly installed Ubuntu 7.04 system. I've been sitting here playing with it off and on all Sunday afternoon and have come to the conclusion that I need to give Linux another try as a desktop/workstation OS that just works. I really hope this works out, I truely do. Most times during the work day, I despise having to use Windows for most of my work tasks since I'm 99% of the time working on a UNIX box remotely. Wether it's a company box in Dallas, Frankfurt or China I've been using putty to remote in to do all work on the servers. Not that using a terminal SSH session will be a different feel from putty, but the environment around that session definitely will. So here we go, a week of nothing but Ubuntu for all things work related, starting Tuesday technically but I have a feeling I will be extending this experiment to any time I touch a computer, outside of video games.

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.

"Alternate" OSes

I played around with DesktopBSD and PC-BSD for a while and found that I hated PC-BSD. I truely do not like it's custom package system as it destroys the beauty that is *BSD, ports+packages. DesktopBSD impressed me more, even if it's a bit behind in the times I found the OS completely usable and updatable from the GUI interface. In fact, I decided to run a test with it and installed it on a File server, Tera, I was putting together. I was going to go with my trusty FreeBSD install or possibly a Fedora Core 6 install (since I work with FC a lot for work) but decided to try something different. My thinking here was "could this OS be useful in the SOHO/small business environment" and so far after 2 months of running it this way I'd have to say yes. I've tried to use the GUI to do most software updating or installing, rather then the usual command line and haven't run into any major road blocks. I need to do more SAMBA configuring via the GUI though to see if this could really be used in SOHO environment for non-uber geeks But lately something has been nagging me, especially after I tried installing Fedora Core with desktop apps then a Ubuntu Desktop install... are Linux distros so far ahead in the race for the SOHO/Small Biz market that DesktopBSD could never break in? I'm considering taking out my DesktopBSD OS drive and installing a Ubuntu Server (with GUI) on the server to find out. That is assuming I can be 100% sure that my software RAID 5 drives (4x500GB) will not be touched. This is definitely something on my to do list...

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.