Jedi Council

I decided to pull the trigger and ditch the dual 21" CRT setup. I bought the Samsung 2693HM. It is 25.5" diagonally with a resolution of 1920x1200. This is 20 pounds and impressive! It will look nice on my new Ikea desk in a couple weeks!

My mug next to the new monitor.

The last components of my new PC just arrived.  I will post a full report later when it all works.  My laptop died last week so I was able to find an old laptop at work to get me by.

My ADS MXL-581 media server works really nicely.  I can play MP3s and movies located on my file server.  Corey downloaded Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes for me and I can watch them on my TV from my home server!  Next will be the Terabyte storage where I will rip all my DVDs to the server and have video on-demand!

I used the weekend to get some computer stuff done.  I upgraded my home server to a Dell PIII-1.0 GHz enterprise machine.  It used to be on a Celeron-600 MHz, so the little bit of horsepower will be nice.  I will use the Celeron machine as my backup machine.  It has Wake-On-LAN capability which the server can activate to do an automatic backup each night.  The nice thing about having two of the Dell enterprise machines is that there is no hardware configuration needed, everything is the same so you just pop the hard disk in and kick it off.  Oh yeah, baby!

I continue to use a dual PIII-1.0 GHz with 1 GB RAM for my workstation/desktop.  I have been using Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, version 7.04 (KDE version of Ubuntu).  I really like KDE and the Ubuntu software repositories.  I can do everything I need in Linux, save needing VMware to synchronize my iPAQ PPC with Windows and Outlook and for Quicken.

Today I installed Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, version 7.10 Tribe 5 (beta testing version).  Next month they will release this new version, which fixes a webcam issue in Kopete, the instant messenger client.  Now, everything works great!  They still need to avoid hand-editing xorg.conf to get dual monitor setups working.  That annoys me.

Rob did some good research to find out how to block popups from popular sports websites, including the new gopsusports.cstv.com! Rob's HOWTO Block Popups

Over the last couple of days I have been working with VMware, a virtualization tool. I installed it on my Linux-MEPIS home workstation without any problems (it is free from www.vmware.com). The goal is to have one machine which can run everything I need to do at home (WWW, email, instant messaging, web development, synchronizing my iPAQ PPC, Quicken, and downloading my Polar heartrate monitor's exercise files). The last three, unfortunately, still require Microsoft Windows. With VMware running, I inserted my Windows XP Home Edition CD-ROM and it installed transparently while running Linux! I dedicated 4 GB of disk space to the Windows virtual machine. It took a long time because my machine is not very fast.

Now that you can buy a fully-supported Dell PC with Ubuntu Linux installed, I decided to check out the price advantage. All prices are for the XPS 410 desktop.

Windows Vista = $899 (without Microsoft Works, probably because it will not work with Vista)
Windows XP = $899 (with Microsoft Works)
Ubuntu Linux = $849 (standard monitor; Dell probably could not get widescreen to work)

What this tells me is that Ubuntu users are not really getting much savings (except for freedom from Microsoft's dictatorship/monopoly). They are still paying for part of the licenses Dell buys from Microsoft. I say this because XP and Vista cost WAY MORE than $50. Dell still makes money, obviously