Our New Pi Day Laptop

To commemorate this year's pi day, we've christened our newly purchased laptop PiPuter. It's an Acer Aspire. We were looking for a super cheap full sized laptop with decent spects and found a good deal at the MicroCenter. Vanessa says that our computer has graduated magniu cum laude from its factory and it is currently watching us - watching, watching, always watching.

One Laptop Per Child, Give One Get One

If you are looking for a cheap, power efficient, portable laptop for wireless web browsing and programming, like I was, consider the XO Laptop from the One Laptop Per Child association. I ordered one to keep and one as a donation through the Give One Get One program. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, I'm especially interested in the wireless mesh networking and social aspects to using the laptop. Some of the the music software looks like fun as well.

I'm ordering one for mostly selfish reasons, but this is probably my first computer purchase which will benefit someone else. Who knows, perhaps a child in a developing nation will discover a new world of seemingly limitless possibilities through programming just like I did as a child. This is my personal take on the vision behind this unique program. The opportunity to order one is slipping away fast, the offer to buy one and give one away ends December 31st. Let me know if you've ordered one, perhaps we can organize a laptop party (Arne I'm looking at you ;-)

Fluxbuntu 7.10

Long time readers may remember the saga of my old laptop (a Compaq Presario 1700T circa 2000). I had ditched openSUSE several months ago in favor of Fluxbuntu, a variant of Ubuntu which used the light weight Fluxbox windowing system in place of the Gnome desktop. My old computer has only 128 megabytes of RAM, so memory is at a very high premium. With the release of Gutsy Gibbon, Fluxbuntu picked up a few new features, so I upgraded and gave it a try. I have been extremely pleased. All the good stuff is there that I enjoyed before (installing new free software using Synaptic or Aptitude, Firefox, XMMS, etc.) but there were a couple of great new additions. For one, automounting of USB drives. I have a small pen drive that I carry around to hold many of my files: music, programming projects, etc. Mounting had always been a bit of a pain with my laptop's OS. Now I just plug it in, it mounts, and an icon for the drive appears on my desktop.

The discovery came at a perfect time. My in-laws decided they wanted to resurrect an old PC so they could browse the web side by side. All they really needed was Firefox, Open Office, and Picasa and their computer had the same amount of RAM as my old laptop (probably from about the same time frame). Fluxbuntu to the rescue ;-) Can you believe it, my in-laws are running Linux.

Reviving my laptop

I have an old laptop which I would hate to see go to waste, an Intel 796 megahertz processor with 128 megabytes of ram and the weight of Windows XP has become too much for it to bear. I want a system that will run quickly and smoothly. I need a web browser and programming tools (gcc, make, python, perl, svn, etc.) and an mp3 player might be nice too. I had been running OpenSUSE, but the performance was still a bit sluggish. Then I tried Damn Small Linux (DSL) and it had almost everything I need. Fluxbox is a great windowing system and it ran extremely well. Things started to break down when I tried to install make, a series of dependencies and library downgrades prevented me from being able to get everything I needed. The problems continued the more I tried to modify the system. So I've tried others, five distributions so far, but none seem to work just right. This is turning into quite the weekend project.