Recently in Hardware Category

In addition to his first e-mail to me, David Gurvich adds more about his experiences with Intel i830m video in Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD:

I did think the problems with FreeBSD were due to using PC-BSD and installing a lightweight desktop on top. After testing with a bare install that turns out to not be the case and the issue is with FreeBSD and has nothing to do with the scripts that PC-BSD uses.

I have not tested OpenBSD but most of the wireless drivers on FreeBSD have been ported from there. I suspect there is a difference between the two that causes these drivers to crash the system on FreeBSD. The primary reason that I was interested in FreeBSD was ZFS support and wanted to setup a file server. The network issue stopped that in it's tracks.

There is a graphical network tool in the FreeBSD ports that seems to work ok but most of my settings were with wpa_supplicant and rc.conf. I believe that PC-BSD has it's own graphical network configuration tool but didn't use that.

Flash does have issues on FreeBSD and I don't recommend installing the linux compatibility to use flash. Instead, use wine with a windows browser. There is a memory leak in the linux flashplugin on FreeBSD that will eventually cause your system to freeze until you kill nspluginwrapper. The same technique may work on OpenBSD.

I have tried Fedora 12 on this laptop and that worked somewhat after tweaking a number of parameters. By somewhat I mean that I had random Xorg crashes and the tweaks simply mitigated the frequency. I gave F12 about 2 months but just could not take the crashes. Fedora 12 is working well on the other systems that I've installed it on but there was a problem with one that had ATI video which required building an xorg module from git.

I am currently using Arch linux on the X30 and, since configuring the boot parameters with 'nomodeset' and locking the xf86-video-intel driver to 2.9.1, have not had any issues with video. The main problem has been with the networking scripts and I am still not sure what the issue is there but installing wicd-1.7 seems to have worked around that. I am impressed with the speed vs Fedora 12. The reason I am impressed is that, prior to Arch, Fedora 12 had been among the fastest distributions on the X30 with a useable firefox in under 2 minutes. The X30 from startup to a working firefox connection takes 45 seconds in Arch.

The main issue I will have with Arch is likely the very reason Arch is so responsive. Rolling releases don't keep old packages around and new versions can cause random failures on working systems. That means that I will need to maintain a list of packages that should not be upraded and be careful on upgrades. Nothing new to anyone who has used Gentoo.

I've currently had Arch installed on the X30 for a month and have had no issues to deal with since the video and networking were fixed. The livecd boots to a text console and I recommend looking at the arch installation guide. Pretty much everything needs to be configured but the wiki makes that simple.

David Gurvich

David, you hit on a number of important points. I will definitely try Fedora 12 to see how it works with i830m, and I agree with you that Arch is an excellent choice. I've written many times about how the Arch community has been a great resource for me in solving my X issues with i830m all the way from Debian Lenny through now.

I neglected to mention ZFS in FreeBSD. That certainly is something to recommend in its favor. There's also a project bringing journaling to soft updates in FreeBSD's UFS filesystem that I heard about in this BSD Talk episode.

I'm not terribly happy about Flash being so problematic in FreeBSD. I forget all the trouble I had with the Opera browser in OpenBSD. That browser and its Flash plugin uses OpenBSD's Linux compatibility layer, and I was eventually able to stop most crashes by changing a parameter in Opera.

Here's what I'm hoping for:

• People smarter than me will figure this out and either make allowances in the kernel and xorg, or will create some other kind of mechanism that doesn't leave users of Intel 830m video chips out in the cold
• HTML 5 will sooner than later take hold with an open video codec and return Flash to what it's good at, which is little applications that I can safely ignore, and stop doing what it's bad at, which is delivering video that can better be handled by a plethora of other formats. The easiest way for this to happen would be for Google to open-source the on2 video codec it recently acquired. (Except that Google already converted the entire YouTube library to the loved-by-Apple patent-encumbered H.264.)

  I've run BSD before, and if Linux/Xorg throws Intel 830m under the bus, I'll be an enthusiastic user of any system that doesn't follow along.

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication.

I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux. Both ZaReason and System 76 are building small boxes around the Intel Atom/Nvidia platform, some single core, others dual core — and I do recommend the latter.

The one stopping point for me, other than money, is that I'm not sure whether or not these pre-built boxes have CPU fans or use passive cooling from massive heatsinks. For years now I've been leaning toward machines with no spinning fans either in the box itself (on the CPU or elsewhere) or the power supply. With Logic Supply I can easily make this happen.

At ZaReason, the Ion Breeze 4220, starting at $399 for single-core, offers a variety of options, including the above-mentioned dual-core Ion CPU. I don't know if Earl, the ultra-accommodating chief technology officer at ZaReason, is offering the option of a fanless motherboard — I'll ask him.

System 76 offers its Meerkat Ion NetTop with dual-core Ion starting at $359.

One thing that ZaReason offers in the Ion Breeze that I like is an optional external fanless power supply.

I've been running my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client as a standalone Linux/BSD box almost since the beginning of my foray into open-source operating systems, with only a single fan blowing across the Mini-ITX motherboard and its heat-pipe-cooled CPU. The fan doesn't work when the box is upright, so for all intents and purposes this is a fanless computer, and I've never had a problem with thermal issues — in fact, it runs quite cool, if not quickly with its VIA C3 Samuel processor (that's supposed to be a 1 GHz model but for some reason only runs at 500 MHz), maximum of 256 MB RAM and woeful sound and video chips.

Right now the Maxspeed is running Debian Lenny from an 8 GB CF card inserted in the thin client's built-in CF-to-IDE interface. Yep, no spinning hard drives either.

System 76 does offer solid-state drives on the Meerkat Ion, starting at $110 extra for a 40 GB Intel drive.

If the Intel Atom Ion processor isn't what you're looking for, both System 76 and ZaReason have plenty of other desktop, laptop and server machines to look at.

The best thing about buying a computer from a shop that ships with Linux (in the case of these two retailers, Ubuntu) is that your hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work. You'll have audio, video, suspend/resume, all that stuff that sometimes is hard to get straight on the box that shipped to you with Windows.

In the times I've spoken with ZaReason's Earl, and the company will build, test and ship pretty much anything you want. They specialize in Ubuntu, but you can ask for a box to be loaded with Debian or CentOS, and I believe they'll do it.

Do ZaReason and System 76 charge more than your standard computer seller? Probably. You can't get the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel deals that are offered on the cover of the Office Depot circular, but those machines often do have bits of hardware that you'll tear your virtual hair out to get working properly.

When you get a machine from a company that specializes in Linux, not only will everything work, but you'll get support that will help you clear up any issues.

And for many people — and I'm getting more like this myself with less time available for banging-my-head-against-the-wall tinkering — it's worth a little extra money for somebody else to have figured out all the issues, or in the case of these companies, to choose hardware components that work well with free, open-source operating systems from the start.

And even if you are a tinkerer, chances are it ZaReason or System 76 have built you a machine, it won't just work well in Ubuntu but will be a great platform for other Linux distros you might want to run.

Not wanting to leave out BSD, you can get a pre-built and -loaded PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) laptop as well as two workstations (prices unknown) from IXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. They seem to specialize in selling servers running FreeBSD and ask that interested buyers request a quote to receive pricing info. They're also offering CD and DVD sets of FreeBSD 8.0 if you don't want to bother downloading the ISOs and burning your own discs.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, I've been giving FreeBSD a lot more thought lately. I've run OpenBSD on the desktop as my primary system for about six months, and I'm considering FreeBSD instead for a future test for the following reasons:

• Easier upgrades and much longer cycle
• More focus on desktop users with hopefully better (and more meta-style) packages for things like GNOME
• Flash 9 and possibly Flash 10 support through the Linux compatibility layer
• Better performance
• I really don't need it for architectures other than Intel/AMD (although PowerPC and SPARC 64 are available; side note — on the various pages emanating from its platforms page, FreeBSD offers not only official manuals from the makers of the hardware in question but also links to other BSDs that run on the architecture. A very nice touch, I think)
• Community that actually cares about end users who aren't developers

I need to try some live images of recent FreeBSD/PC-BSD releases. (Is PC-BSD a live CD yet? I haven't kept up, but I did utilize the live environment of DesktopBSD back when I was testing it).

I never did the full review I promised of Dru Lavigne's excellent "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, but I find it to be an excellent reference for the FreeBSD and PC-BSD user. Dru is one of the best writers around in the Unix community, and even if you don't run BSD you can learn a lot about using Unix/Linux from this book. I got a whole lot about the shell, file permissions and other Unix sys-admin tasks, from "Basics," just as Michael Lucas' discussion of sudo in "Absolute OpenBSD" makes that now-way-out-of-date book extremely relevant and useful for anybody running any kind of Unix/Linux today who wants to make the most of sudo in their own environment (and especially on the server).

On the same tangentially arrived-at topic, Dru Lavigne's latest book, "Beginning PC-BSD: Frugal Unix for Power Users," is slated to be released three days from now. If past work is any indication, this will be an excellent book for anybody contemplating the use of PC-BSD.

I'd rather Dru write a book on using FreeBSD on the desktop — not necessarily PC-BSD but building out a FreeBSD-based desktop through ports or packages — but I can understand her focusing on PC-BSD given that the iXSystems-led project is a lot closer to what Linux users are used to.

Run the operating system and accompanying application software that ...

• Works best on your hardware
• That you feel personally/technically competent about (or want to get there)
• That includes the applications you want and need to use
• Which has an acceptable term of support from the project/vendor for your needs
• Which has an acceptable distance from (or to) the cutting-edge of software for your needs

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

Distrowatch guru Ladislav Bodner has been rolling more than a few operating systems onto his ASUS Eee PC 900 netbook — probably the most popular netbook out there at this point (they even sell them at Target now).

In this week's Distrowatch (which I recommend as a must-read for anybody who wants to follow what's happening in Linux and the BSDs), Ladislav writes about how a mouse-over problem that tends to freeze the screen in Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the ASUS Eee was solved in the Linux kernel but almost immediately returned due to the relevant patch being pulled from the kernel because it began causing other problems.

Ladislav goes over how you can go backward from Linux kernel 2.6.28-11.41 to 2.6.28-11.40 and get your ASUS working again under Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

He also provides a tip for those using SSD (solid-state drive) disks on how not to wear them out:

Finally, a quick reminder for those who are about to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix (or any other Linux distribution) on a netbook with solid state drives. Since these drives have a limited life span that depends on the frequency of write access to the drives, you can greatly prolong their life span if you follow these two rules while installing your preferred distribution (here is the source of this information, although there are those who dispute this):

* choose a non-journalling file system (e.g. ext2)

* don't create a swap partition

As Ladislav says, there is some dispute about the life of flash media in everything from those mini USB drives and SD camera memory cards to devices designed to replace traditional IDE and (mostly these days) SATA .

Some people have said that the MTBF (mean time between failures) for SSDs is so low when compared to spinning hard drives that the devices will last much longer than traditional spinning hard drives due to the lack of moving parts in an SSD. They say that worry about killing the flash memory with repeated write cycles is overblown.

But others are worried about killing their flash memory too quickly and take precautions such as the recommendation above not to have swap space on the drive.

For those who might not know, most operating systems do use swap space on the hard drive in the event that your computer's RAM (memory) fills up. I won't go into just how much space you need for swap because that's a whole new topic that's been discussed countless times in countless places. (I generally set aside 300 MB for swap on my systems).

Even Windows uses swap (that's one of the reasons your box tends to slow down after it's been running all day [or week/month/year]) — you've got a lot of critical stuff that the OS has written to the swap area of the drive.

Back to flash/SSD memory: As I say, some people think that worrying about excessive writes to flash is unwarranted. While I'm tempted to say that you shouldn't use an SSD on a server, Sun Microsystems (yep, the company bought recently by Oracle) is offering SSD-equipped servers and storage arrays. Sun thinks SSDs are the (near) future in servers since performance gains are too large to be ignored.

Sun is using single-level cell (SLC) flash memory, which has a much longer life than the cheaper multilevel cell (MLC) devices that pack more memory into the same space but have shorter write/erase lives.

We're a bit far away from the ASUS Eee PC and Ubuntu at this point in the post, aren't we?

Maybe. But here's what I want to say about flash-based storage: I'm all for it. I'd like to start moving everything I have to SSDs as soon as fiscally possible.

One thing I really like is a silent PC: no fans, and no spinning hard drives. If you've ever worked on a system with drives snaking out of the back of the case and sitting on a table (I did it for years), you know how much noise traditional hard drives make and how much heat they throw off.

For the energy and noise considerations alone, I'd like to dump spinning hard drives.

To that end, I'm doing one test and hope to do another soon. I've been running my Self-Reliant Thin Client (converted Maxspeed Maxterm) with an 8 GB CF card in the box's built-in CF-to-IDE adapter as the unit's main drive. I am still running Debian Etch on it (and will continue with it until I manage to get networking into the room). The box isn't in heavy use at present, but it is running (and has been this time for more than a week). I do have swap set up on the flash, and with only 256 MB of RAM, it'll probably get used a bit.

I'm running regular backups of the /home files to a 1 GB USB flash drive with rsync, so I have an all-flash system.

It's not fast. A low-end CF card (mine is a Transcend) doesn't have the performance of a top-of-the-line SSD. For one thing, the Transcend uses MLC instead of SLC and for that reason alone should have a shorter life.

I'll keep the box running for quite some time to monitor its progress with the flash memory and see if it can withstand repeated use. An upgrade from Etch to Lenny would definitely tax the CF card.

Another thing I'd like to try is an SSD in one of my laptops — maybe the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), which I've recently put back into service. At least the drive is easy to get to.

In my last post, I told of how I dumped a whole mess of computer equipment at Goodwill, which miraculously accepts such electronic waste — and gladly, too.

Now I reveal what I got rid of and why:

It wasn't the easiest parting of the ways, but I did dump the original This Old PC. The 1995-97 era white-box PC featured a 333 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, a maximum 256 MB of 100 MHz RAM, an 8 GB hard drive and a motherboard with two ISA slots in addition to its three "modern" PCI slots. The sound card for the box was in an ISA slot and therefore difficult to get working in Linux. I did have a spare PCI sound card, but it really wasn't worth making the switch.

While 256 MB is OK to run Linux or OpenBSD, it's far from ideal, and the reality is that you're in for lots of swapping for many, many tasks. And since the box sat on the floor for years and was booted maybe twice a year at that, it was time for it to go. True, it was a white box, but it wouldn't accommodate micro-ATX motherboards, the most common size these days. I could've gotten a full ATX motherboard as a replacement, but the power supply wouldn't have been adequate for newer motherboards with SATA drives and all that comes with an up-to-date PC.

If I really want a "new" desktop PC, I'll either start from scratch with a new white box (or black box, as they commonly are these days) or get a cheap Dell/IBM/fill-in-the-blank box and just run that without investing a whole lot in individual parts.

The 256 MB memory limit was the biggest stopper for This Old PC. I can live with 333 MHz of CPU, but not being able to get 512 MB of RAM made this box expendable. I still do have its monitor, though. I also saved the keyboard, the floppy drive, the hard drive and some IDE cables. You can never have too many IDE cables. Until you really do have too many. But they're small.

I also got rid of a much "newer" box, a 2001-era Dell Dimension 8100 with a 1.2 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 256 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. OK, I kept the hard drive — the biggest full-size IDE drive I have at the moment. I also got rid of this box's biggish 17-inch CRT monitor. I have 2 CRTs in the herd now, the 15-inch that came with This Old PC and my LaCie 22-inch behemoth that, I've discovered recently, looks super sweet being fed by my 1995-era Sun Sparcstation 20. The LaCie also has two VGA inputs and easy switching between them, so that's another feature in its favor. The fact that it's freakin' huge is not so much in its favor. I do have an old LCD monitor (an NEC or something ... I can't remember at the moment) that I'm not using, but it's ready for service should the need arise and the LaCie move out of its way.

I got this Dell for free, and I intended it to be a project/test computer. Even though it's faster than any desktop I have in the herd, I got rid of it for three reasons:

1) Even though it's clearly a desktop machine, for some user-hating reason, Dell designed it to use RAMBUS server memory, which is rare and expensive. I would have needed to spend quite a bit to get it up to 1 GB.

2) Dell engages in even more user-hatred by using nonstandard parts. The power supply for this tower was a Dell-only item. And this one had an annoying high-pitched whine
ALL THE TIME when the box was plugged in but powered OFF. I wasn't comfortable at all with that, and I was equally uncomfortable paying $80 for a power supply for an 8-year-old computer.

3) I've been inside quite a few PCs ... and the design of this Dell, like many I've seen, is not exactly user-friendly. The RAM is hard to get to (WHY does Dell do that?), it's difficult to get the hard drives in and out, and there's a weird green plastic piece in there designed to funnel air to the RAM modules. I just didn't feel like this was a piece of hardware I needed to be dealing with.

So out goes the Dell. I'm not ruling out getting ANOTHER Dell if I can do it cheaply ... and don't have to do anything but plug it in and run it. Pacific Geek often has deals on refurbished Dell and IBM boxes.

I also got rid of three of the 10 or so broken laptops I collected in the Daily News move last year. Only a few of the 10 booted, most are so old as to be unusable (64 MB RAM ... things like that), and most won't boot at all. I got rid of the 64 MB RAM model (an old Compaq) and a few Toshibas that were so parted-out that they really weren't worth keeping around.

I saved enough of the old laptops to provide parts, should I need them, for my two working Toshibas and possibly for the Gateway, the latter of which needs a new PCMCIA assembly (the pins are bent ... long story).

I also dumped an Iomega ZIP drive because a) it was in the same pile and b) in the days of cheap/reliable USB flash drives, ZIP drives are pretty much obsolete. I've got quite a few more ZIP drives that will bite the dust as soon as I collect them together for the next trip to Goodwill.

So what did I keep?

I still have The Self-Reliant Thin Client, a 1 GHz (really 500 MHz with every OS I've run for some reason) converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client that also sadly maxes out at 256 MB of RAM but is now running Debian Etch from a CF card. At the time I bought this 2002-era box, it was the cheapest way of experimenting with mini-ITX, fanless power supplies and CF booting. It's not the best box — video and sound are sub-par ... but it's so damn small and silent. I'd like a better mini- or Pico-ITX box, that's for sure.

I kept The Debian Mac, the G4/466 MHz PowerPC box, which I recently was able to pump up to 640 MB of RAM. It's running Debian Etch (it's not networked, so I can't update it) right now, but I'm considering giving it a try with Mac's OS X 10.4 operating system so we'll have a second Mac OS system in the herd in addition to the iBook G4.

And right now the 1995 Sun Sparcstation 20 is still on my desk. I've run NetBSD 4, Solaris 9 and currently OpenBSD 4.4 on it.

The whole rap on the Sparc architecture at this point is that 32-bit boxes like the Sparc 20 are a whole lot harder to use productively on the desktop than 64-bit Sun hardware. I really should've gone for something 64-bit, like a Sun Ultra. They don't cost all that much more, and Solaris runs better on them (I have several bones to pick with Solaris and Sun, but that's another post for another time), Debian Lenny SHOULD actually boot, install and run (Debian abandoned 32-bit Sparc long ago), FreeBSD supports 64-bit Sparc and not 32-bit ... Firefox just might run in 64-bit in NetBSD (it won't in 32-bit) ... and in OpenBSD you've got many, many more applications to choose from, including Firefox, Thunderbird and Abiword, Geany, all of which are not available as 32-bit Sparc packages, with the reason being that these ports won't build in 32-bit Sparc (and yes, I tried them all, and more).

I only have my own experience to go by, but in OpenBSD at least, the absence of a precompiled package for 32-bit Sparc means that the port of that application won't build.

And while the Mac G4 is a very nice hunk of hardware that I'm keeping for the moment, between it and the Sparc, I think my curiosity with non-x86 hardware is safely sated for the time being.

Sure it's fun to play with other architectures, but it's also fun to have stuff work, and when it comes to running the apps I want to run, that means the world of Intel and other i386/x86_64 processors.

I still have The $15 Laptop — the Compaq Armada 7770dmt — in partial service, even though for some reason it refuses to run X in OpenBSD like it used to. I still haven't figured that one out, and once I get the /home files off of the drive (or swap a new drive in), I'd like to try loading either Debian or OpenBSD into it again. It's a nice laptop, with a great screen and keyboard, and I love the built-in power brick with only a 120-volt cord between the laptop and the wall outlet.

The Compaq's 144 MB memory limit is challenging, as is the 233 MHz CPU, but it's a machine I'll probably keep around for awhile.

My "workhorse" machine remains the Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop with 768 MB of RAM, a 20-something GB hard drive split between Windows XP and OpenBSD 4.4, and (somewhat unfortunately but not deal-breakerishly) broken sound.

With the Toshiba, I use the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card for wireless, and I have OpenBSD set up pretty well, with Java runtime for the Firefox browser, Flash Player 7 (the "newest" you can get in the BSD world) for Opera, plus software that includes OpenOffice, Geany, Firefox, Thunderbird, the GIMP, Pidgin, gFTP and Blender (recently added as a possibly video-editing solution in OpenBSD).

In the console I've been using vi for text editing. I gave up on Nano due to the permanent linefeeds it adds when you wrap text. In Vi, if you wrap text, the same thing happens, but if you don't wrap text, the lines break at the end of your screen and while not looking pretty do at least stay where you can see them. Unwrapped lines in Nano, like every other console editor I've used, just run off the screen. Vi has always been "good" this way and always will be. The more you use it, the easier it is to switch between edit and command modes and to think the vi way ... and it's just good practice to keep those vi chops, however limited they are (and mine are limited to be sure).

I've been seriously using this laptop with OpenBSD 4.4 since late 2008. That's longer service — and more files, more e-mail and more setup — than any other FOSS operating system I've used since I began with Linux in January 2007.

On this installation, however, with so little disk space — 6 GB for /usr, where all the applications live (and not enough to build the whole Java Development Kit but enough to build the binaries for the Java runtime) and 3 GB for /home — I'm pretty much outgrowing the space I've allotted myself and do need to backup all the data and start a new system from scratch on a much-larger hard drive, also probably shifting to the Toshiba with working sound.

My dilemma at this point: Stay with OpenBSD (which has provided an excellent learning experience and been extremely functional and reliable, if not anywhere as easy to deal with as your average Linux distro), move to Linux (which would give me up-to-date Flash, easier system management and wider application choice), or possibly dual-booth those two OSes on a much larger hard drive. The latter is the most likely scenario, except that for real work, having all of my user files in one place and accessible by every OS on the drive is more essential than ever.

Hey ... this post was supposed to be about machines I'm getting rid of, not the ones I'm keeping. All of this Toshiba talk belongs in its own post ... so I'll stop now and spare you all the rest — for now, anyway.

I'm very interested in Dag Wieers' recent post on why he chose a Lenovo Thinkpad X200s as his new laptop.

Using what developers use is always a good idea. Chances are that more things will work at the beginning, and then it will only get better as those developers start fixing what's broken.

Among the interesting features on the X200s:

• 80 GB solid-state hard drive
• Small and light, yet with full-size keyboard
• Complete hardware-maintenance manual available (VERY important, since laptops tend to break)
• Trackpoint instead of touchpad (I really like the trackpoint on my Compaq Armada 7700dmt; both the functionality and the saving of space with no touchpad) Wi-fi, Bluetooth, fingerprint reader, media-card reader (it would be great if this all worked under Linux)

As I write in this week's print column, I'm getting ready to give the Ubuntu- and CentOS-powered $0 Laptop to our 5-year-old daughter.

I mentioned that I do have a replacement that was working out pretty well. Of course that wellness went considerably south in the past few days (as chronicled in Dark Side of the Laptop), but I remained determined to prep the laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu/Xubuntu 8.04 LTS as its No. 1 distro, for our daughter, who used it tonight to run TuxPaint.

Whether or not my new/old Toshiba (or newer/just-as-old/identical Toshiba) works out, I'm ready to move on. I've got boxes I've set up in the past couple of months (The Self-Reliant Thin Client, The Debian Mac, which I bet I could finally set up with OpenBSD and actually get it to boot) that could be used more, and boxes I haven't yet had time to work on (an old Dell with something in the 1 GHz-ish range and for some reason stuffed with 256 MB of ECC server memory).

I'm also thisclose to getting my hands on a Sun Sparcstation 20, a box that was the envy of every self-respecting geek ... in 1995. That could be a fun project, don't you think?

As of today, here are all the machines I use and what they run:

At the office:

Work box:
Dell Optiplex GX520
Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2

The Debian Mac:
Power Macintosh G4
466MHz single PowerPC processor
384 MB RAM
Debian Etch

The Self-Reliant Thin Client:
Maxspeed Maxterm 5300(??) thin client
VIA C3 Samuel (1 GHz, running at 500 MHz for some reason)
256 MB RAM
8 GB Transcend Compact Flash module as boot drive
1 GB USB flash drive for backup
Debian Etch

At home:

iBook G4
1 GHz CPU
384 MB RAM
120 GB Fujitsu hard drive (replaced by me in a 3-hour odyssey)
OS X 10.3

This Old PC:
Pentium II MMX (333 MHz)
256 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive
Windows 2000 (I haven't booted this or connected it to the Internet in over a year)

The $0 Laptop:
Gateway Solo 1450
Mobile Celeron (1.3 GHz)
1 GB RAM
30 GB Toshiba hard drive
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian Lenny, Puppy 3.01

The $15 Laptop:
Compaq Armada 7770dmt
Pentium II MMX (233 MHz)
144 MB RAM
3 GB IBM hard drive
OpenBSD 4.2

I have quite a few machines in various states of repair that I might resurrect over the next year if and when I get the time, but this is what I have right now. With the exception of the white-box This Old PC, all of these get fairly regular use.

This week's Tech Talk column covers the creation of what I call The Self-Reliant Thin Client, which is basically a very-bare-bones PC that is booting and running off of a Compact Flash module instead of a traditional spinning hard drive.

Here is the photo gallery, which will get full captions when I get the time to write them.

I have been wanting to test solid-state storage technology for some time now, and with the solid-state drive option for Mac laptops costing $600 (over and above the MacBook's $1,600 price), the drives themselves as laptop replacements in 64 GB sizes going for $170, I decided to use the slower but way cheaper Compact Flash technology, which is very common in high-end digital cameras.

I finally got an 8 GB Compact Flash chip from newegg.com for about $20, and I'm backing up my user files on a USB flash drive plugged into the back of the box.

The box — which started out as a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client — is running Debian Etch.