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They've been doing it for years.

http://www.trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20050418/034205.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gubatron/4065512250/

Not sure... I missed this presentation: http://www.trilug.org/node/66

I glanced at the Video editing software about this time last year and it was in v2.0 stability. Well, the rate of improvement is phenomenal. I did use DVDStyler (with DVDAuthor) to create a navigable DVD. That was very cool. Easy. Free. Worked.

The RIAA is suing the pants off of Americans but ignoring the rest of the world. As long as this continues then the rest of the world will use proprietary formats and commercial software without paying. So, the rest of the world already has a free standard. Just like with drugs and other things, Americans are bearing the burden of cost for the rest of the world.

TimJowers

Jym Zavada demoed this at the LUG before last here. He got a DSL machine for about $300 and then migrated to another distro. One trick is to turn off inode read counters to minimize hits on the flash and give longer lifetime. His presentation info is at: http://www.trilug.org/?q=node/30

Looks like Intel wants to do the same. With the low cost of ARM and other processors, they are just trying to get in the market before it blossoms. Low cost, good power computing will be upon us at least by 2008. What I imagine is a PDA-like device that blootooth's to a large screen, DVD player burner, and other periphs/household electronics. You can carry the PDA and for the average user it will be fine for a laptop/PC. It'll have the 2in-3in screen but also can have a touchscreen (like Motion computing sorta) that one could carry with it.

Nice to see Intel and others promoting computing. Will certainly be a computer world in a few years. Not too long until everyone alive will have been born after the computers were invented.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ - Serviza Monster Linux Computers. Power. Power on and GO!

Very similar load, yes.

http://www.trilug.org/~minter/bestbuy.html

There's a reasonable howto here.

Check out this old blog entry of mine. It details how to set up VNC in a way that does what I think you're trying to do. Clients for any popular OS are abundant.

You can run that on top of a regular Linux distro, or if you also need thin clients you can add this to an LTSP server.

Fedora Core 2 is running the 2.6 kernel. I hear from first impressions that the performance
improvements are nothing short of stunning, but I haven't tried it yet.

• File Server - Running NFS and Samba, my home directories and other shared files can be reached from any computer in the house (current count a little over 2 dozen).
• Squid - I have all my web browsers using this machine as a proxy server.
• syslog - All my *NIX boxen send copies of their syslog events here.
• DHCP/DNS/NTP - These services could probably run on a pocket calculator, or maybe my old VAX, but the Ultra 5 is seriously underworked.

• File Server - Running NFS and Samba, my home directories and other shared files can be reached from any computer in the house (current count a little over 2 dozen).
• Squid - I have all my web browsers using this machine as a proxy server.
• syslog - All my *NIX boxen send copies of their syslog events here.
• DHCP/DNS/NTP - These services could probably run on a pocket calculator, or maybe my old VAX, but the Ultra 5 is seriously underworked.

RDU might be better than it was a year or two ago but it is still pretty bad. I had to leave Raleigh/Durham for Philadelphia because of the lousy job market. Keep in mind I'm a more senior level geek with 10 years in the market (10 years working with MS technologies, 7 years with Linux & Solaris).

I remember going to a TriBUG meeting where every single person there was laid off. These were senior level UNIX geeks, and not one of them could find work. The other UG I was involved in, TriLUG, was doing better probably because of the Linux boom combined with a larger contingent of sysadmins & programmers entrenched in academia where they were a bit safer. Still, enough members of that organization were out of work that some time was set aside at the beginning of every meeting for people to stand up and give a short pitch on who they are and what kind of work they were looking for.

Unless you were a guru sysadmin and programmer and DBA, you had almost no chance of finding work in RDU. And even then you had to be prepared to fight hard, accept entry level pay and still likely face rejection.

The older/larger cities seem to be fairing better than small specialty towns like RDU or Silicon Valley. New York City, Philadelphia, etc. are large and diversified and seem to be weathering the storm better. I'm not as plugged into RDU today as I was a year ago today, but a year ago today it was a wasteland in RDU and only a fool would relocate there without already having a job established.

I've not used it myself, but tonight at our local LUG in Raleigh there's going to be a presentation on White Dwarf Linux. From what I've heard they have a pretty nice embedded linux setup as well as some neat embedded hardware platforms they target out-of-the-box.

Computers don't get slower with age. Our expectations on them just increase.

My web server was made in 1996. It's a Dell PowerEdge 4200. My desktop machine is a screaming Duron 750MHz. But those are the faster machines.

Some of my other museum pieces include a Sun Ultra 5, half a dozen Sun Ultra 1's, various SPARCstations from the 1 up to the 20 (and most models in between), a number of old PARISC boxen, couple of old DEC AlphaStations, and a small swarm of Pentium 100-133's.

I operate them all with just one keyboard. An IBM type "M" that was manufactured on Aug 20, 1987 and still going strong after many years of abuse. I keep a spare one around just in case (but haven't needed it yet).

A Pentium 100 with 32M of RAM and a recent installation of OpenBSD is a very useful machine. In fact I've powered down most of mine because I had inflated expectations of how many I'd need to run all the services that I wanted.

The machines that are starting to find their way into dumpsters today are actually Pentium II and Pentium III class, which are more than enough PC for most people. Most need a boost in RAM but the processor is more than fast enough to run a modern Linux distro, KDE with the eye candy levels cranked down, some web surfing, email and KOffice.

Even at the office I'm reclaiming old servers that are about to be put out to pasture, reconstitute them with Linux and some extra RAM, and put them back into service.

Here is a shell server that is pretty well used by the members of TriLUG that will show you 101 days is easy.

I've seen plenty of Linux systems approaching and a few exceeding 1 yr of uptime but by then it's time for a distro upgrade.

Actually I think that a mainframe may fit better, considering (from IBM paradigm) that the mainframes are more vertically oriented and the AS/400's more horizontal.

Think of a mainframe as a refrigerator form factor (at least the late model ones) and the AS/400 as a very tall coffee table.

The black thing in the foreground of this picture is a late model IBM mainframe. It basically takes up as much room as any 19" equipment rack (or, like I said, a refrigerator).

The downside to an AS/400 or a mainframe no matter which way you go is the exotic (for residential) power hookup requirements. Many local governments preclude residential zoned lots from having three phase power, which could really screw you if you want to bring home the big iron.

With drivers for the 802.11g adapter, more people would look at providing alternative firmwares. I've recently started working on such a project for the Dell TrueMobile 1184 because Dell actually provided source code when asked, and all the hardware support is there with open source drivers.

First of all the CPU horsepower is overkill.

The RAID 5 configuration is going to be terribly slow for writing operations. Best to spend money on fast disks (15,000 RPM) and a RAID 0+1 or RAID 10 configuration. You lose 50% of your disk to the RAID but it will be much faster and much more resilient.

Do use squid to save on internet bandwidth (and make sure to peer with other caches).

I have some ideas on how to stretch your dollars and do this in a very efficient & resilient manner. Drop me an email if you would like to engage in more direct dialogue about this (see my site for contact info).

Try the Dell TrueMobile 1184 wireless router. It has five ethernet ports on it, a prism2 wireless adapter, oh and did I mention it runs Linux and Dell is happy to give you the source for the GPL components?

Spin your own firmware and have a Linux router with several 100Mbps and one 802.11b interface all for less than $75.

Then, use Win4Lin, from Netraverse .

It's lighter and I've seen it run on a K6/2-400 with 64MB of RAM. This is not a fancy machine, but it was able to boot Win98, start MS-Power Point and give a presentation at our LUG meeting point.

They use some kind of modules to give a protected-thread access to the CPU. This is way it runs so fast in slower machines. Also it's not as memory-hungry as vmware.

I was trully impressed.

If only it was easier to install, at least in my Mandrake...

Regards,
opkool