Rebuilt a new(old) computer.
As a tech, not so long ago when installing MSWindows on users computers at a former job, people were dismayed at the fact of having to use a mouse via a gui (graphical user interface) with wysiwyg (what you see is what you get pronounced wizzywig). They protested they preferred the keyboard only environment. They exclaimed the keyboard environment was more efficient and exacting. In fact, we who were installing the new environment were verbally accosted for the change over. Now if you suggest using a system that does not have a gui, you go through the same negative feedback.
Decided to do a new kind of roughing it by building a system that was technically obsolete using a non-gui environment, but the operating system was up to date. Yep, that means everything has to be done through the keyboard. Makes me think of the "Star Trek" movie where the Scotty character was using an old Apple Macintosh computer and could not get it to work. He was trying to talk to the mouse. He was told he had to use the keyboard in addition to the mouse to make it work.
What to use? I had a spare Dell Pentium II 333 mhz based computer that has 256 megabytes of ram. cdrom (not dvd) and a twentyfive gig hard drive. Today's computers typically use drives that have thousands of gigs of storage. I probably used just a four gig drive for even more effect. The operating system would be Debian Linux latest Squeeze version. (Debian will also run on those old G3 Apple new world Macs.) All I needed was an install cd to get going.
Looking for picture that went here.
Installed Debian Linux Squeeze with the most important free as in speech software I needed. i.e. Mail (accessing gmail with alpine) , spreadsheet, light web browsing, database, word processing, music player, text based graphical utilities, gpm to capture screen shots (had to have one mouse based program), and a host of other software such as time and idea management If that was not enough, accounting software, a web server, and programming utilities were also included. This all came to a total of under two gigabytes of space including the operating system. That meant I still had ninetyfive percent of the hard drive still free! The latest proprietary operating systems probably would have not only not work on that system, but could not fit on the hard drive I was using. Software cost: $0 Hardware cost: $0 as the hardware was all what someone did not need or want anymore.
People say you have to have all that gui stuff to make life worthwhile. I am not sure that is true. For example with that old system, I can do what is known as web page scraping. You can automate getting what you need off the web. You can translate languages, get your horoscope, weather, sports scores, and a ton of other information without spending so much oohing and aahing over the graphics. For an example of web page scraping see: http://www.instructables.com/id/Web-page-scraping-via-Linux/. There are other follow up instructables too.
$ ./lc.sh "el toro" es en
the bull
Note: using text makes it easier for my computer to recite the weather for me. Which means I can be doing other things while getting the report!!!
So this next week, I going to try to use only that machine to do all my computing. Again a sort of computer roughing it. Guess, what I am getting to is probably ninety percent of what we does not require a super system. Now it is time to put my money where my mouth is. One less computer to the dump and one more computer that extends it's ROI. Later.
Decided to do a new kind of roughing it by building a system that was technically obsolete using a non-gui environment, but the operating system was up to date. Yep, that means everything has to be done through the keyboard. Makes me think of the "Star Trek" movie where the Scotty character was using an old Apple Macintosh computer and could not get it to work. He was trying to talk to the mouse. He was told he had to use the keyboard in addition to the mouse to make it work.
What to use? I had a spare Dell Pentium II 333 mhz based computer that has 256 megabytes of ram. cdrom (not dvd) and a twentyfive gig hard drive. Today's computers typically use drives that have thousands of gigs of storage. I probably used just a four gig drive for even more effect. The operating system would be Debian Linux latest Squeeze version. (Debian will also run on those old G3 Apple new world Macs.) All I needed was an install cd to get going.
Looking for picture that went here.
Installed Debian Linux Squeeze with the most important free as in speech software I needed. i.e. Mail (accessing gmail with alpine) , spreadsheet, light web browsing, database, word processing, music player, text based graphical utilities, gpm to capture screen shots (had to have one mouse based program), and a host of other software such as time and idea management If that was not enough, accounting software, a web server, and programming utilities were also included. This all came to a total of under two gigabytes of space including the operating system. That meant I still had ninetyfive percent of the hard drive still free! The latest proprietary operating systems probably would have not only not work on that system, but could not fit on the hard drive I was using. Software cost: $0 Hardware cost: $0 as the hardware was all what someone did not need or want anymore.
People say you have to have all that gui stuff to make life worthwhile. I am not sure that is true. For example with that old system, I can do what is known as web page scraping. You can automate getting what you need off the web. You can translate languages, get your horoscope, weather, sports scores, and a ton of other information without spending so much oohing and aahing over the graphics. For an example of web page scraping see: http://www.instructables.com/id/Web-page-scraping-via-Linux/. There are other follow up instructables too.
$ ./lc.sh "el toro" es en
the bull
$ ./gw 77331 Weather: Observed at Wolf Creek Air Cond., Coldspring, Texas Updated: 12:52 AM CDT on June 22, 2011 Temperature: 78.9°F / 26.1°C Wind: WNW at 0.0 mph / 0.0 km/h Conditions: Overcast Humidity: 70% Dew Point: 68°F / 20°C Pressure: 29.90 in / 1012.4 hPa (Rising)
Note: using text makes it easier for my computer to recite the weather for me. Which means I can be doing other things while getting the report!!!
So this next week, I going to try to use only that machine to do all my computing. Again a sort of computer roughing it. Guess, what I am getting to is probably ninety percent of what we does not require a super system. Now it is time to put my money where my mouth is. One less computer to the dump and one more computer that extends it's ROI. Later.
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