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.

I opted to do a full install, which ran smooth as silk. After the 1 hour or so installation process, I was greeted with a snappy looking Gnome desktop (most other distros default to KDE), which was a new thing for me. So far, I like it. Ubuntu seemed to detect my hardware well, even down to the scroll wheel on my mouse, which was a frustration I had with earlier linux distros. I quickly found out how to use their package manager, Synaptic, to download and install additional software, as well as bring your current software up to date. It was easy to use, and allowed me to install a few things that weren't included in the default install, such as cvs and the GUI version of VIm. Firefox was included in the base install, which was nice. Basically this means that after an hour or two of work, I have a fully working machine with all of the hardware configured and working.

So my project for the past 48 hours has been to rid this machine (That's right... this blog is being authored on my newly acquired laptop) of the resource hogging Windows OS (Win2k) we were running and install a nice lightweight Linux distribution on her. After a little googling, I settled upon VectorLinux, which is specifically made to run on older machines. Having installed several flavors of linux on several machines now, I was not exactly expecting this to work right the first time. Almost always, the video, sound, mouse, or network device doesn't work properly without a little post-install love and care. I was pleasantly surprised, though, at the end of my installation. I was blessed with wireless internet access from the first time I logged in after the install.

The video, on the other hand, took some effort. When I logged in to the command prompt I got beautiful color 1024x768 display. When I logged into the gui, however, I was stuck with crummy 640x480 graphics. I spent most of the evening googling and learning about XFree86 and it's configuration files, and the neomagic video card used by this laptop, and about window managers for linux. My struggle continued through the night (I actually had dream/nightmares about the state of this machine as I slept) and into the morning. I surfed the net, looking for the information that would be the key to my success, as Liz (when she finally woke up) lay next to me watching episodes of Everwood on the beautiful display of her superior laptop. I was sidetracked for a while, when I stumbled upon information about a special XF86 config file specifically for the NeoMagic card, but eventually discovered that this config file was outdated by later versions of XFree86 which directly support the card. So I grabbed and installed the latest version of XF86, and hit paydirt... almost

The new version of XF86 did start in beautiful 16bit 1024x768 glory, but not into the default vectorlinux window manager menu I was expecting. Rather, it booted into the default XF86 XWindows which, frankly, sucks. So, I read a little more, did some digging around in the X11R6/bin folder, set up my <$home>/.xinitrc config file, and now am running IceWM as my window manager. It's a little different than the KDE interface that has been the default window manager on every other version of linux I've installed, but it looks much better than the Windows interface, and runs very quickly considering the machine that's running it.

So, here we are. I'm reading email from my home and work address. I'm on Aim and have already chatted with several people. I'm blogging (for the first time in a long time), and I'm quite pleased with my technical prowess. Pure joy!

The PC has been acting flakey lately, though, so we were obviously going to have to do something with it. I re-asked Liz if there was any particular reason not to put Linux on it, and she couldn't think of one. So on Wednesday evening, we nuked Windows and put slackware version 10 on it. As of this point, I do not regularly come in contact with any computer that runs on a Microsoft operating system.

One application I grew very fond of in my time as a M$ user was Macro Scheduler, a program I'd highly recommend to anyone who still chooses to (or is forced to) work in a Microsoft OS. Macro Scheduler allows you to automate virtually any task by authoring macros with it's own custom scripting language. These macros can be run on a schedule, in response to the presence of a window (such as a "you have been disconnected" box), or by the use of shortcut keys. I became heavily dependent on automating tasks and spent a great deal of time writing macros, and then assigning them to keyboard combinations that I memorized. I was able to do quite a bit of repetitive and mind-numbing work very quickly by utilizing macros to do the parts that were the same every time, so that I only had to think about the parts that were different.

Once, just for fun, I wrote a macro that would log in to a Vegas site every day (at pseudo random times) and play a virtual slot machine game several hours a from my home computer while I was at work. This little macro earned me enough prize points for two free nights stay for me and a guest at the Bellagio, as well as a free buffet meal for each day of my stay. Unfortunately, within a few weeks of me running the macro, they changed the terms of the site, disallowing any further prizes, and putting a very short deadline on redemption of the prizes I'd already earned. I never got to use the free nights and free meals. Still, it's satisfying to know that I was able to earn the prizes.

Back to the point... the scariest thing about giving up my microsoft OS in favor of Linux was giving up Macro Scheduler. Fast-forward to this weekend, after having a few months using Mac OS X (built on Unix), and interacting with my computer and several servers through a Unix shell, it finally hit me. As I read a borrowed book on sed & awk (an awesome pair of Unix power tools), I realized that the *nix OS itself IS Macro Scheduler. I'm sure anyone who has used *nix for any length of time would hardly raise an eyebrow over this minor realization, but for me it was huge. I feel like I've graduated to a whole new level as a computer user. It's the first time I really see why people rave so much about the wonders of *nix. I am excited about what is to come as I continue to learn more about *nix. I'm already happy with what I'm able to accomplish. However, I just had a brief glimpse at how much more there is to be done. I know I will enjoy the process of getting there.