ALL2EZ

hard2do

As my friends & family will attest, I certainly don’t live by Homer Simpson’s farcical philosophy. As a full time computer scientist, I often find myself doing things the hard way. Sometimes it’s for lack of an easy solution, sometimes it’s to achieve a more desirable result, and sometimes it’s purely to satiate my love of a good challenge.

As much as I enjoy sharing my own philosophies with the world, this blog will serve another purpose. For the most part, I will be focusing on using the site as a collection of references in my quest for a more productive computing environment than what I am currently working with. It seems that I spend far too much time setting things up, fixing what’s broken, and tweaking what does work.

Unfortunately, these issues are inevitable for me, since I have committed myself to using Ubuntu Linux as an operating system. Don’t get me wrong, I am a strong supporter of free software, and I will always recommend Linux to anyone who shares my distaste for the limitations enforced on OS X and to those who suffer from the expense, bloat, and malware threats inherent in Windows.

Linux offers exactly the opposite: a free, lightweight, safe, private, and infinitely customizable user experience. However, the road to operating system enlightenment is paved with bugs and instabilities. The lack of support from the major hardware and software vendors will continue to be problematic for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps if I were to invest in some new equipment, I could choose hardware with fewer compatibility issues. For now, though, I’m going to keep hacking away at my existing machines with the hope that I can get something stable setup.

Even though I make my living on computers, and working with technology is my most time consuming hobby, I don’t have any machines in service that I actually picked out and bought for myself. Here’s what I am working with:

• ezmac: Apple MacBook (2nd Generation)

  This notebook was given to me as an Xmas bonus by my employer in December of 2006. I have experimented with a variety of configurations and am currently settled on dual-booting OS X Leopard (with Windows Vista installed in VMWare Fusion) and Ubuntu Linux Gutsy Gibbon (with Windows XP installed in Innotek VirtualBox). All of the aforementioned operating systems have full access to a shared FAT32 partition.

• ezserver: MicronPC ClientPro Pentium 4

  This old Micron was offered to me by a friend after I helped her set up a computer meant as a replacement for this old beast. Since I needed a backup solution, and had some extra hard drives, I quickly accepted the gift. Not strictly a server, this ancient tower is actually a desktop system with redundant hard drives used to backup the data from the other computers on my local network. My entire music collection is backed up to these drives, so the pc performs some light media server duties. In addition to the NAS capabilities, this dinosaur is constantly seeding and/or leeching on the BitTorrent protocol via Deluge (strictly public domain and fair use and material, of course). Although the computer has too little ram for my usual multitasking, Ubuntu Hardy Heron runs smoothly on it and the machine adequately serves its purpose (pun intended).

• ezpad: Thinkpad T60

  This IBM Thinkpad was provided by my employer as my work computer (for software development, testing, and support). It has since been replaced for that purpose by a Thinkpad T61, so I will continue to use it for my own ends until my employer decides to sell it and asks for it back. I basically only use it occasionally as a complement to ezmac when I need extra processing power, screen space, or a testing environment. The current setup is dual-boot Windows Vista and Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

• honorable mention: 3 flat panel-monitors, bluetooth headphones, ipod touch, external hard drives, a usb hub, several keyboards and mice (wired & wireless)

  A variety of peripherals and accessories will be vital in helping my computers reach their full potential.

Over the next [insert undetermined time period here], I will be working towards uniting these computers in three-part harmony. I will begin by upgrading ezmac to the latest version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. My propensity for experimentation has led to this machine becoming increasingly unstable, so I will be starting from scratch. A fresh install of Linux on an Apple notebook designed for Apple software is a disparagingly long process of installing software and ensuring flawless interaction with internal and external hardware. The next step will be to revamp ezserver with a secure foundation on which to build automatic redundancy and a base of only essential software. Third, I will hook up ezpad to work as a trusty (but regrettably expendable) sidekick to ezmac.

Stay tuned and enjoy the show!