Geeky Nostalgia

by | May 28, 2010 | Tech

The over-arching tone of my blog is indeed a Spiritual one, and that is not changing, however, a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was once well and truly ensconced in geekdom, that mysterious culture, where building computers and tinkering with cutting edge software is the norm and you look with disdain upon the masses who simply “use” computers, however, something happened, REAL LIFE arrived, my time was absorbed more and more by my business, spiritual pursuits/church etc and then one day it happened, I unscrewed my hard drive which was in my custom built box, and robbed it for business use in my Mac, along with it’s monitor.

Since that time, I have been a “user”, never tinkering too much, foregoing the excitement of the Linux world I used to enjoy, taking the proprietary and slick OS X  as my daily work-horse, I traversed the slopes of life, until yesterday…

Yesterday I received something in the mail…

It was in a large box…

and it had Samsung written on it…

Yes it was a new 24″ LCD monitor, with it I replaced the old faithful 20″ Benq, this means my mac is now hooked up to 2x 24″ screens (this makes my design work a much nicer experience) but this created an interesting situation… a surplus monitor… what shall I do with this, now lifeless panel?

Months prior I had traded the AMD 3800+ X2 (manchester) in my old box for a 3500+ (venice) and an 80 gig hard drive. Through this swap, the box was now essentially working, however it remained in the wardrobe for a year, as there was no inclination in me or monitor on my desk for it operate with.

That was until yesterday when I set up the new monitor in the office, then once again deliverd the surplus monitor to my room, to which I connected the old box. *orchestral music building for effect* keyboard!, mouse! ethernet! *drumroll*

POWER ON!

“BEEP…   BEEP….   BEEP….   BEEP….”            -nothing

So, I googled the beepcode which was the overture to my deflated hopes, discovered it was a RAM issue, pulled the second stick out and it booted without issue 🙂

SO! I installed Linux once again… after many moons of its absence I was impressed how far it has come… I am using a distribution called Linux Mint which is basically Ubuntu but with proprietary drivers etc, and some other nice features, and I must say, a child could install it without so much as straining a neuron in the process, it was a truly simple process, and the results are fantastic, I have not had to fix ONE thing, it was all detected, set-up and neatly sealed for me, in under 10 minutes from the finish of the install I was browsing in firefox, checking my emails in thunderbird twittering with gwibber, and chatting on MSN and IRC.

If you are a tech tinkerer like me, have a look at mint, it is well worth it.

I will now return you to your regular programming.