Almost on the Dark Side
Looking at my last post, I see that I have not contributed to this site in almost two months. I've spent some of that time playing poker, but much more of that time playing with the computers in the house. Liz has converted to the dark side of the computer world by abandoning Windows and installing ubuntu linux on her new HP DV1001us laptop. We've spent a few evenings getting things just so on her machine, but now can easily do anything that we used to be able to do with Windows and more. With free software such as open office, evolution, the gimp, and others, we can do practically anything we want with her laptop. Upon installing ubuntu, I followed the directions on their wiki to get the various types of media files to work. We can now watch DVD's and assorted media files (avi, mpg, etc) as well as listen to mp3s and view flash content on the web.
At the same time as we were getting Liz's machine up and running on linux, I was also working on my PC that's been sitting in the back of the house out of reach of the router, which now resides in our entertainment center in the living room. Rather than wait on getting a wireless card installed and configured in that machine, I finally just decided to treat it like a server, and hard-wire it to the router. So now it sits, sans keyboard, mouse and monitor, in the entertainment center just below the router. It's also running ubuntu linux, and houses about 1/3 of a terrabyte of storage capacity. I installed samba server so that Liz and I can easily connect with our laptops to copy files back and forth to the server. I have also configured it with a dynamic hosting service, so that I can connect to it from anywhere I happen to be. Eventually I plan on configuring it to run test websites and an sftp site.
So as it stands, we are now only running windows on one machine... a little p266 laptop w/ 64MB of ram. I had vector linux running on it successfully for a while, but had to switch back to windows to run online poker clients. If I ever get my hands on a more powerful laptop, though, I'll try using wine to run my poker clients on a linux box, so that I can finally sever all ties to microsoft. At this point, the only thing standing between me and my goal is having a machine powerful enough to do what I want to do.