1I thought a little update might be in order for those interested in my computer hobby. When I last brought it up I was running Mandrake Linux 9.2 on the computer that I got in 1998 and I had it online with my new DSL connection. I've made some new acquisitions and what I have now is pretty fun. I'll put the rest of the post in an extended entry to spare my non-geek readers.

Sara's mom gave me her old computer, an eMachine from about 5 years ago. It's a 366 Mhz Celeron processor. Not stellar, but a little faster than the Pentium II in my other box. It came with a 14 inch monitor and an installation cd for Windows 98 SE, which I used after wiping the 4 GB hard drive. Since my old 17" monitor got fried and I have a small desk I decided to get a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse switch) so I can use one workstation for both computers. Here is what I bought. That's right, I paid 99 cents. Shipping was about $9, but I still think it was a bargain. Now I can hook up four computers to one keyboard monitor and mouse. I switch just by hitting a couple of buttons on my keyboard. I also bought an ethernet switch so I could share my network and DSL across 4 computers. So I can use both of my computers easily and I can also drop in others if I get more or want to work on a friend's confuser.

I got rid of Mandrake and installed Debian Linux. That didn't work so well for me so I put Fedora Core 2 on it. So far I really like Fedora. I've been able to do a lot more with it than I ever did with Mandrake. I'm installing programs pretty easily, reading files from the Windows 98 computer (and printing to it's shared printer). I've installed Firefox and several extensions. I'm working on setting up a web server just so I can play around with it. This has been a fun hobby for me. It keeps me off the streets.