For Geeks Only

In our house we have an eclectic network that just got, uh, ‘eclectic-er’. Years ago, our computer life started with an Amiga 500. One simple computer. Life was so much simpler then.

Recently, counting my laptop, we had five computers on the network, two running Mac OS X, one running Windows 98, another XP Home, and the last XP Professional. The Windows 98 machine was just not handling business very well, and was very frustrating. So, we replaced it with another Windows XP machine that my daughter was no longer using.

As a result, we were stuck with an out of service, ten year old Dell museum piece that I hated to trash. Slowly the wheels of geek adventuredom began to turn, and I realized that I had the perfect machine on which to try a long dreamed-of experiment without the fear of harming anything.

Now, to my great delight, we have added a sixth computer on the network, this one running Linux (the Ubuntu distribution). This old computer has been resurrected.

Most of you will not at all understand the thrill of this. There is the geek side of me that is excited by being able to try something and get it to work. And there is the economical side of me that is blown away by the fact that this computer is up and running with the latest distribution of the Linux operating system and it is all absolutely free.

I’ve only used this for accessing the internet (particularly playing Pandora radio), but if I were serious about using this machine, it is loaded with the full OpenOffice office suite (word processor, presentation program, spreadsheet) plus an additional word processor (Abiword), and a ton of other stuff. And I did not have to spend a dime.

For a general purpose computer, this can’t be beat.

And it’s fun as well.

Any one else out there using Linux?