As I have been sitting here preparing for an early morning call from New York, I murdered Smeagol, my Pentium IV 1.5gig system. Dead but not forgotten Smeagol is currently being reborn within the world of Linux.
Snape is the Alienware. He handles my entire workload and does it brilliantly but he truly shines within the gaming world. You know, he scored a 438 on his benchmarks and that’s far superior to Dean Lorey’s measly 300’s benchmark. Smeagol sits loyally next to Snape and for nearly a year has served as the holder of backup files and handles AIM when Snape is busy gaming.
Since I no longer run games on Smeagol and since his main purpose is for quick backups then I thought a stable system was needed.
Smeagol’s birth is complete. It’s…well it’s amazing. He’s fast now. He has been sluggish for months but not anymore. I’ve installed Fedora Core II and maybe that wasn’t the smartest choice considering Core III will be available any day now but Devin convinced me to run Linux from the CD by way of Knoppix and I was sold. No more waiting.
The toughest part of the process was waiting for connection in order to download the nearly the 4 iso files barking up a total of 2 gigs…and later burn them to four CDs. Oddly enough during the installation I was never asked for CDs 3 and 4 so that may be normal or a bad thing down the road, I guess we’ll see.
But within 12 seconds of rebooting after the install I was surfing the net. Linux found every piece of hardware, located the network and I did basically nothing but work on Magnus for my coming phone meeting.
Presently there are 116 available updates through Red Hat. It’s set up not unlike Windows update. Hold your pointer over the lower right hand icon and the information appears. So, Smeagol’s updating at the moment.
I guess that would be my first criticism. There’s no status bar on the update. I actually thought he’d frozen up for a moment until I noticed it was fetching a header and recalled reading on one of the Linux forums that the header download could take as much as an hour. Still it would be nice were there some bar showing me the current siltation. Oh well.
And the only other concern is that Snape doesn’t see Smeagol anymore. Smeagol sees Snape of course and I tooled around inside Snape’s files a moment ago just to see if I could. It’s a good bet Devin’s gonna get an IM the moment he logs on.
Last night we tooled down to Santa Monica to check out Sarah’s recently overhauled crib. Rip and Sandra, Sarah’s parents, Mel’s Uncle and Aunt, were in town.
More to come, my call just came in.
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