05.11.06

Mini PC, and stuff

Posted in General at 4:46 am by jw

The temporary move to San Jose is pretty much complete now. We have our computers all working in the 2nd bedroom and the hotel staff were nice enough to pull all the extra beds out of there so we have a lot of room to spread out, at least in the one room. Back on EQ2 again and should be caught up on all the progress we missed in the 2 weeks we were gone pretty soon now.

My new toy of the week is a mini-pc from AOpen which I managed to get through the purchasing department (ie wife) to replace the old Linux box we left behind in Pittsburgh. It really is a great little machine – 1.5 GHz Celeron, 1G DDR2 memory, 30G HDD with 250G external USB2 drive attached, gigabit ethernet, slot loading DVD/CDRW and all for just under $500. Honestly it’s pretty hard to complain about that sort of value – especially when it comes in a tiny little 6” square, 2” tall case. It’s really the perfect headless Linux box!

As expected, Gentoo went smoothly onto the machine and it compiled and ran in no time compared to my old 650MHz Duron box. I definitely love that distribution. Nothing like being able to compile your entire system from scratch specifically optimized for your CPU with a few simple “emerge” commands. Guess that’s the geek factor for you.

Nothing much else new (thankfully – not much time for anything else new). Still working on a way to get an externally visible IP address for stuff like custom web serving and MUD/MOO hosting – probably going to go with a VPS system from DEHE (who are a subsiduary of Solidhost, my current provider) so I can play around to my heart’s content!

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