Solo Technology

Another laptop died here last week (/whine /whimper) so we’re one short. Why did it die? Really not sure, but I’d say it’s related to the busted AC adapter end that was reduced to wedging bare wires just right… that many sparks and power losses probably isn’t healthy. It was the little portege I’d set up a few months back. It worked, but at the end of the day it was just too fragile and sluggish to be an ideal daily use machine.

Meanwhile, my old laptop is currently the demo machine at work (it’s put on a lot of miles the last few weeks) so we had to come up with something for the wife and middle boy (currently addicted to runescape) . Having them log on to my windows 2003 domain controller was kinda creeping me out. Fortunately, I had an older duron based machine here with a Centos 3.3 install on it. I can’t recall if I blogged about CentOS, but it is basically Red Hat Enterprise linux. I experimented with it a bit end of last year when I was pondering my next internet server. Generally liked it, but figured I wasn’t quite comfortable enough to feel like I secured it well enough. So I just set it aside at the time.

Anyways… fired it up last weekend to get it patched up to current. Took a bit to recall my login and password, but got it going and fired up X. All seemed to be there so I lit up the patcher and let it trundle through 6 months of updates. While that was going, I decided to pop off the side of the case and figure out what this odd ‘grinding’ ‘ticking’ noise was all about. Spotted the cause right away - a power lead was hanging right over the cpu fan and just kinda bouncing off the fan. I leaned in to move the lead out of the way just as a son bumped me — causing me to push my finger right into the fan. ouch, but no blood. The fan, however, didn’t recover so gracefully (well, I don’t know if IT swore too). Stone cold dead. Quickly yanked the power before things got hot and tabled it.

Sidenote: 5 minutes later the domain server blew up after installing a current jre for runescape. Registry corrupted. omg. Do I have the midas touch or what? Anyways, that turned out to be a quick fix. Booted from the boot CD into recovery console. Whilst researching (*cough* ok, googling like mad) a fix, I decided I might as well run chkdsk and at least feel like I was doing something. Well, lo and behold, that fixed it.

So, yesterday I got a chance to pick up a new heat-sink / fan for the centos box and got that going again. Finished the patch, installed gaim and firefox and we seem to have a winner.

Now I see that Centos 4 something or other is out. Debating on if I care, but have to admit I’ve enjoyed putzing around on this thing. Now I just need a reason to have a full time linux box around again. It’s been a few years since I was linux only at home (even played EQ in linux thanks to the good folks at TransGaming). Why’d I switch back? Got tired of running vmWare win98 just to use Quickbooks and couldn’t find a good linux option. Perhaps I’ll slide Quickbooks on the old work laptop… that would solve THAT problem at least.

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