but the idea of a second keyboard just for such purposes is a good one... my current keyboard is on an ergonmic arm thingy attached to the underside of the desk, so it's not really resonating through the surface too much...
debian 3.0 (woody) is actually quite easy to pare down for use on older systems, and you benefit by having newer, stabler, more secure versions of any programs you'd like to run... i've got it on an old 486 here acting as the house firewall, and the total install is somewhere around 121MB, plus swap space... i took out all the documentation, man pages, the system sources (headers and crap), and any packages i didn't need/want... it runs a 2.4 kernel and a few services, notably iptables and dhcpd... doesn't have X, though, which it seems like what you're looking for... if you want just a decent web browser machine, i'd suggest getting a 2.4 kernel with framebuffer support enabled and running gpm and elinks in the console... mmm... text-mode browser with tables and mouse support...
Re:Hey I have one of those too!
on
Antique Distros?
·
· Score: 2
i can totally relate here... for two years i lived with 3 other CS majors in a big old apartment here in downtown boston (well, "big" is relative to the other apartments you can find in downtown boston for under $3k/month)... anyway, this place was completely wired... we turned one of the closets into a literal server closet... we had Sun3 motherboards as wall decorations... the cases to those Sun3's were made into the most sturdy coffeetable I have ever seen in my life... our entertainment center was made from a pair of old Mac towers and a massive PS/2 server chassis... catV drops in nearly every room (mostly my doing, as i was the only one with a laptop) running over a 10/100 switched ethernet... 768k SDSL with 10 static IPs... a keyboard and an old laptop screen grafted into the living froom telephone "just because"... A/V cables running from the computer room to the living room... even our christmas tree had a string of 30-pin ram for garland, CDs, hard drive platters, and a NIC (plugged in, of course) as decoration... you get the idea...
and then, a few months ago, i got married:)... my wife and i couldn't afford much in the way apartment space, so we've got a studio... now, my wife is a geek, but not of computers... so as she does understand my desires for masses of computer equipment, she helps keep me in check... instead of using the rainbow of blue, red, yellow, grey, and black CatV cable that i had for the new place, i went and bought a spool of white at her request... this way, it runs around the edges of the apartment and "blends in" more with the white wall paint... the firewall/gateway is now tucked into a nice shelf on her desk, with the switch and dsl bridge up there as well... we've got (white) cable drops to my desk, the nightstand, and her desk... she even insists on keeping our xbox and gamecube controllers in a little wicker basket when not in use:)... we even bought a wooden rack for the videos/dvds/videogames, instead of the traditional "pile next to the TV" approach that had worked so well at my last place...
someday, when we can afford a bigger place, though... im' going to have my own workshop "geekroom"... and she'll get her mineral collection / craft room (dude, geologists are weird...)... but right now, it's a pretty good deal, and i'm slowly turning her into more of a CS geek;)...
indeed, running ximian gnome on my ultra30 here, and a chick two offices over has KDE on her sun box... i'm fairly certain the CDE is mostly included to maintain full compliance with the UNIX standard... i have no idea *why* you need to have CDE to call something a 'UNIX', but you do according to the folks who own the trademark... and that's part of the reason why it's incorrect to call a linux system unix
that's York County Federal Credit Union... tiny little CU back in my hometown in Maine, but they've got really cool online banking software that runs great in mozilla, konq, ie, etc... my only problem is that sometimes the toolbar renders strangely in mozilla, and i have to force the frame to scroll down to use it... other than that it all works great... it's one of the main reaons i've kept this bank, even though i now live in Boston... well, that and its services are free:)... and the home-town service blows the doors off of anything you'd get from Fleet...
True story, and an occasion to remember for any students present should you repeat this demonstration.
A friend of mine walked into the first lecture of his chemistry class. This particular lecture series was being held in the gymnasium of the college, with the students piled in on the bleachers down towards one end of the gym, where a small table had been set up. This tabled contained a small bunsen burner and three empty-looking 2-liter soda bottles, with their caps screwed on. As the students settled into place, the professor walked into the room, and quietly lit the bunsen burner. He then proceeded to unscrew the cap from one of the bottles, carefully placing his thumb over the opening. He turned to the class, and with no further introduction stated, simply: "This bottle contains hydrogen. It burns readily." He then took his thumb off the end of the bottle and quickly touched off the stream of pressurized gasses on the burner, and *FWOOM*. A flame somewhere on the order of 30 feet long shot out of the bottle. (or so I'm told... but when it's right in front of you, i'm sure it would *seem* a lot like 30 feet). At the end of this demonstration, the first five rows of bleachers had been completely cleared (into the next few rows). The first few rows remained empty for the rest of the term.
fed up with the standard office furniture, my dad made a couple of chairs like this... except that since his desk is a standing-height drafting surface as well as a computer station, his two pilot-seats are each mounted on 4-foot pedestals with casters
"Honey, I can't. I have to be with Debbie this FRIDAY NIGHT."
since my fiance is named debbie, i can get away with this:)... in all honesty, she thinks it's really cool that i use a distribution so closely resembles her name
as i was saying... i really had him going for a few minutes... i could see visions of paranoid conspiracy theories forming in his head as to who was attacking our poor little aravir.net, and why... and then it dawned on him what was happening, and how he thinks it's the best think since Moof!:)
i do this very thing at work... i've got all my messages (over 6000 and growing daily) in one massive mailbox, which makes it easy to scroll through in pine, from wherever i am in the company... and i have evolution, on my desktop, set up to point to the same IMAP account, and do virtual-folder sorting... that way all my mail is nice and sorted when i'm in the pretty gui that makes it easy to navigate, and all my mail in a nice single list when i'm in a low-bandwidth text session (ie, pine)...
i love evolution, and wish there were a windows version so i could switch to it at home, too
Excuse me sir, but I am not a holier-than-thou! I will have you know that I am *far* above such infantile behavior. Only an *idiot* would adopt such a stance, and am I ever glad that I'm not like *them*. I'm good and I'm humble, much unlike the rest of you.
i've recently switched to using evolution under debian linux at work, and i've been extremely pleased... corporate standard here is netscape messenger v4.x, and so i'd basically defaulted to that on my old sparc workstation... when i finally got a new PC, it came preinstalled with win2k, and for a while i just didn't have the time to install a proper os on there... i didn't really look forward to using outlook (no matter how much i dislike messenger) so i just kept my mailstore in ns messenger... when i finally got a chance to put linux on my desktop pc, i tried out kmail, which effortlessly imported all my nsmail messages... at this time i also decided to switch to IMAP, though, and kmail's IMAP support is decidedly lacking (at least in 2.2)... a coworker suggested i try out evolution, and it's been absolutely great... had no problem interfacing with the IMAP and LDAP servers here, and the interface is just what i've been wanting in a mail client for a long time... virtual folders are absolutely great, as they allow me to have everything all nice and sorted in a graphical interface (ie, evolution), whilst keeping things in just a straight list for console clients (ie, pine) for when i'm only able to SSH into the corporate network
so yeah, overall it totally rocks, and while there are a few bugs / annoyances in it, i've been very pleased overall... and besides, the logo has a monkey! how can you go wrong with a monkey?
since the results of such a keyboard would probably not be all that quiet, it's probably not quite what i'm looking for ;)
we don't have a couch you insensitive clod!!
... no room for one :)
... my current keyboard is on an ergonmic arm thingy attached to the underside of the desk, so it's not really resonating through the surface too much ...
i'm serious
but the idea of a second keyboard just for such purposes is a good one
debian 3.0 (woody) is actually quite easy to pare down for use on older systems, and you benefit by having newer, stabler, more secure versions of any programs you'd like to run ... i've got it on an old 486 here acting as the house firewall, and the total install is somewhere around 121MB, plus swap space ... i took out all the documentation, man pages, the system sources (headers and crap), and any packages i didn't need/want ... it runs a 2.4 kernel and a few services, notably iptables and dhcpd ... doesn't have X, though, which it seems like what you're looking for ... if you want just a decent web browser machine, i'd suggest getting a 2.4 kernel with framebuffer support enabled and running gpm and elinks in the console ... mmm ... text-mode browser with tables and mouse support ...
like this ... i was shocked, too ...
i can totally relate here ... for two years i lived with 3 other CS majors in a big old apartment here in downtown boston (well, "big" is relative to the other apartments you can find in downtown boston for under $3k/month) ... anyway, this place was completely wired... we turned one of the closets into a literal server closet ... we had Sun3 motherboards as wall decorations ... the cases to those Sun3's were made into the most sturdy coffeetable I have ever seen in my life ... our entertainment center was made from a pair of old Mac towers and a massive PS/2 server chassis ... catV drops in nearly every room (mostly my doing, as i was the only one with a laptop) running over a 10/100 switched ethernet ... 768k SDSL with 10 static IPs ... a keyboard and an old laptop screen grafted into the living froom telephone "just because" ... A/V cables running from the computer room to the living room ... even our christmas tree had a string of 30-pin ram for garland, CDs, hard drive platters, and a NIC (plugged in, of course) as decoration ... you get the idea ...
:) ... my wife and i couldn't afford much in the way apartment space, so we've got a studio ... now, my wife is a geek, but not of computers ... so as she does understand my desires for masses of computer equipment, she helps keep me in check ... instead of using the rainbow of blue, red, yellow, grey, and black CatV cable that i had for the new place, i went and bought a spool of white at her request ... this way, it runs around the edges of the apartment and "blends in" more with the white wall paint ... the firewall/gateway is now tucked into a nice shelf on her desk, with the switch and dsl bridge up there as well ... we've got (white) cable drops to my desk, the nightstand, and her desk ... she even insists on keeping our xbox and gamecube controllers in a little wicker basket when not in use :) ... we even bought a wooden rack for the videos/dvds/videogames, instead of the traditional "pile next to the TV" approach that had worked so well at my last place ...
... im' going to have my own workshop "geekroom" ... and she'll get her mineral collection / craft room (dude, geologists are weird...) ... but right now, it's a pretty good deal, and i'm slowly turning her into more of a CS geek ;) ...
and then, a few months ago, i got married
someday, when we can afford a bigger place, though
indeed, running ximian gnome on my ultra30 here, and a chick two offices over has KDE on her sun box ... i'm fairly certain the CDE is mostly included to maintain full compliance with the UNIX standard ... i have no idea *why* you need to have CDE to call something a 'UNIX', but you do according to the folks who own the trademark ... and that's part of the reason why it's incorrect to call a linux system unix
that's York County Federal Credit Union ... tiny little CU back in my hometown in Maine, but they've got really cool online banking software that runs great in mozilla, konq, ie, etc ... my only problem is that sometimes the toolbar renders strangely in mozilla, and i have to force the frame to scroll down to use it ... other than that it all works great ... it's one of the main reaons i've kept this bank, even though i now live in Boston ... well, that and its services are free :) ... and the home-town service blows the doors off of anything you'd get from Fleet ...
Error: PERROR17 - Error description for 'ERR:GeneralErrMsg' not available.
I'm still not sure where it came from
True story, and an occasion to remember for any students present should you repeat this demonstration.
... but when it's right in front of you, i'm sure it would *seem* a lot like 30 feet). At the end of this demonstration, the first five rows of bleachers had been completely cleared (into the next few rows). The first few rows remained empty for the rest of the term.
A friend of mine walked into the first lecture of his chemistry class. This particular lecture series was being held in the gymnasium of the college, with the students piled in on the bleachers down towards one end of the gym, where a small table had been set up. This tabled contained a small bunsen burner and three empty-looking 2-liter soda bottles, with their caps screwed on. As the students settled into place, the professor walked into the room, and quietly lit the bunsen burner. He then proceeded to unscrew the cap from one of the bottles, carefully placing his thumb over the opening. He turned to the class, and with no further introduction stated, simply: "This bottle contains hydrogen. It burns readily." He then took his thumb off the end of the bottle and quickly touched off the stream of pressurized gasses on the burner, and *FWOOM*. A flame somewhere on the order of 30 feet long shot out of the bottle. (or so I'm told
fed up with the standard office furniture, my dad made a couple of chairs like this ... except that since his desk is a standing-height drafting surface as well as a computer station, his two pilot-seats are each mounted on 4-foot pedestals with casters
"Honey, I can't. I have to be with Debbie this FRIDAY NIGHT."
:) ... in all honesty, she thinks it's really cool that i use a distribution so closely resembles her name
since my fiance is named debbie, i can get away with this
you work for verizon, don't you?
as i was saying ... i really had him going for a few minutes ... i could see visions of paranoid conspiracy theories forming in his head as to who was attacking our poor little aravir.net, and why ... and then it dawned on him what was happening, and how he thinks it's the best think since Moof! :)
that's freaking awesome ... i really had my roommate (who runs the domain our apartment is on)
i do this very thing at work ... i've got all my messages (over 6000 and growing daily) in one massive mailbox, which makes it easy to scroll through in pine, from wherever i am in the company ... and i have evolution, on my desktop, set up to point to the same IMAP account, and do virtual-folder sorting ... that way all my mail is nice and sorted when i'm in the pretty gui that makes it easy to navigate, and all my mail in a nice single list when i'm in a low-bandwidth text session (ie, pine) ...
i love evolution, and wish there were a windows version so i could switch to it at home, too
heck yeah ... this is just a fun game overall ...
sheez, some moderators really have no sense of humor ... how is this a troll??
... is she a goer, eh? Know whatahmean, know whatahmean, nudge nudge, *wink*wink* know whatahmean, say no more?
-----
For those lacking context, check the script. Seriously though, congrats!
heh cool ... i know someone who graduated from st. mary of the woods, right next door to your alma-mater
but what you'd really want is a beowulf cluster of these running linux and connected to your yopy!
</slashdotism>
actually it boils down to "shorter is better", or in the words of thoreau: "keep it simple! keep it simple! keep it simple!" :)
Always remember this basic rule of writing:
Conciseness is to be preferred over loquacity and verbosity.
Excuse me sir, but I am not a holier-than-thou! I will have you know that I am *far* above such infantile behavior. Only an *idiot* would adopt such a stance, and am I ever glad that I'm not like *them*. I'm good and I'm humble, much unlike the rest of you.
eww ... at least he's not pimping cattle ...
i've recently switched to using evolution under debian linux at work, and i've been extremely pleased ... corporate standard here is netscape messenger v4.x, and so i'd basically defaulted to that on my old sparc workstation ... when i finally got a new PC, it came preinstalled with win2k, and for a while i just didn't have the time to install a proper os on there... i didn't really look forward to using outlook (no matter how much i dislike messenger) so i just kept my mailstore in ns messenger ... when i finally got a chance to put linux on my desktop pc, i tried out kmail, which effortlessly imported all my nsmail messages ... at this time i also decided to switch to IMAP, though, and kmail's IMAP support is decidedly lacking (at least in 2.2) ... a coworker suggested i try out evolution, and it's been absolutely great ... had no problem interfacing with the IMAP and LDAP servers here, and the interface is just what i've been wanting in a mail client for a long time ... virtual folders are absolutely great, as they allow me to have everything all nice and sorted in a graphical interface (ie, evolution), whilst keeping things in just a straight list for console clients (ie, pine) for when i'm only able to SSH into the corporate network
... and besides, the logo has a monkey! how can you go wrong with a monkey?
so yeah, overall it totally rocks, and while there are a few bugs / annoyances in it, i've been very pleased overall