Making the switch

About 2 weeks ago, I gave up using Windows on my home computer. After almost 3 years of running pretty stable, all hell broke loose and there didn’t seem to be any way to fix it. So, I bit the bullet and installed Linux (Fedora) on the second hard drive, and haven’t booted back to Windows since. I had most of what I needed up and running within the first few hours.

Last night (instead of watching the State of the Union), I finally got MythTV running on the computer. I’m now a very happy camper. I can record shows and watch them whenever I want (It’s a Personal Video Record (PVR) like Tivo).

Still having problems syncing my Palm to the computer, but this seems to be a known issue.

Two more things left to attempt. First, getting the Prismiq Media Server to run on the machine (shouldn’t be too hard). And second, maybe switching from Quicken over to GNUCash. Quicken is probably the only thing I’m tied to Windows for right now. However, I do my banking online anyway, and really only use Quicken for record keeping.

Google Desktop Search

I installed the Google Desktop Search program the other day and I’m really impressed. It’s really slick and much faster at finding things on my computer than the Windows search tool (plus I like all my apps web-based).

But, I came to a weird realization about the tool. It’s index of my 150 Gigs worth of storage on my home computer is about the same size as the second hard-drive I bought for my computer in college… 340 Mb!

Crazy to think that I’d have plenty of room with 340 Mb 10 years ago, but now that’s the size of my personal search index.

Gmail – Inbox

Gmail – Inbox

I got Gmail! Suddenly, I feel so complete and at one with the interweb!

I have INVITES to give… Send me an email with your name and current email address to get them: david.nachman@gmail.com

Time to reinstall

But this time it’s not Windows… In my attempt to upgrade my linux box from Fedora Core 1 to Core 2, I ran out of disk space today. It was the result of a failed “best practice” from a few years ago, where I created a separate partition for each part of the system (root, home, var, usr, and tmp). 3 Gigs seemed like enough space for /usr a few years ago, but it’s been tight the last year, while /var and /home were only using about 20% of their allocation.

So, after a few hours of “creative partitioning” in an attempt to get one big partition, the system became unbootable. Instead of wasting more time trying to fix it, I opted for a clean install.

Of course, I was smart enough to back up all important files, so I should be able to get the system reconfigured just the way I like it.

Update Sunday 6/6: Well, things don’t seem to have gone well… I got the system installed, but it hung overnight. I have a feeling it has something to w/ the X server . I’ll try turning all the X server stuff off and see if it’s stable. Otherwise, it may be time for a new distribution. Pretty disappointed, considering that with all previous Redhat and Fedora Core 1 versions, I would easily go a month between PLANNED restarts.

Update 2 Sunday 6/6: Well, it may not have been X. I decided to switch Java over to the IBM JDK… I switched back to Sun’s kit for Linux… so far so good… I’ll definitely need to file a bug report if that turns out to be the culprit. Oh, the shame

Prismiq MediaPlayer

I just got a MediaPlayer for my birthday. What a great gift! It’s so great to be able to play my music on my stereo, as well as view pictures and movies from my computer.

Plus, it seems very hackable and seems to run on Linux, Java and Tomcat.

# hostname
PRISMIQ
# uname -a
Linux PRISMIQ 2.4.18-encore-11 #202 Wed Jan 21 12:06:51 PST 2004 mips unknown
# uptime
10:29pm up 1 day, 23:05, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.05

How cool is that?