Vintage workstations. I've read two articles this past week about running Linux or another free Unix on vintage hardware.

Yes, Brian, baseball will soon return. I hate the things Major League Baseball does (Bob Costas once likened choosing sides between the players and the owners to choosing sides between Iran and Iraq), but we've chosen to stay together for the kids. I'm sure everyone who cares (and some who don't) can guess what I think of Bud Selig, but I'll tell you anyway, soon enough.

How Linux could own the education market. I spent some time yesterday evening working on computers. They were contrasts to the extreme: One, a brand-spankin' new 1 GHz AMD Duron system with 512MB of RAM and 80 GB of 7200-rpm storage (IDE, unfortunately--but for $800, what do you want?). The other was an elderly AST 486SX/25 running Windows 3.1 belonging to a local teacher who goes to my church.

Something I read on LinuxToday on Monday made me realize something. The article was a tutorial on writing Gnome apps with Python. Not too exciting, right? Not until you realize the implications. Python is a high-level, interpreted language. Gnome produces good, professional-looking applications with Windows-like functionality like toolbars and menus and drag-and-drop.

After Dan Bowman pointed out another blogger's recent difficulties installing Evolution on Mandrake 8.1, I had little comment other than, "That wouldn't be an issue if you're running Debian." Well, I think I said a few other things because I tend to be wordy, but that was the only important thing I had to say.

Desktop Linux! I wanna talk a little more about how Linux runs on a Micron Transport LT. I chose Debian 2.2r3, the "Potato" release, because Debian installs almost no extras. I like that. What you need to know to run Linux on a Micron LT: the 3Com miniPCI NIC uses the 3C59x kernel module. The video chipset uses the ATI Mach64 X server (in XFree86 3.36; if you upgrade to 4.1 you'll use plain old ATI). Older Debian releases gave this laptop trouble, but 2.2r3 runs fine.

Enough of this other stuff. I actually felt like messing around with computers yesterday. I read about Eric Raymond's new PC (IBM was nice enough to finance building an obnoxious Linux box for Mr Raymond and Linus Torvalds), which is, in short, a dual Athlon-1200 setup with two big SCSI drives. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention how much memory he put in it. I'm assuming he splurged and got a gig or two. His comment? "I tried hard to gold-plate as much of the system as possible and load on all the extras and accessories I could, and was nevertheless unable to raise the total parts bill over $7,000."

I wrote up a post in advance, then against my better judgment I sent in a boy to do a man's work. Windows crashed on me. Granted, it doesn't happen too terribly often, but when you lose work, that's not much consolation.

I'm writing this from my fast and lovely new Linux workstation, compiled from scratch using Sorcerer.. I'm a psycho, I know, starting a compile in the morning before leaving for work and letting it run all day, just in hopes of having a slightly faster computer. But it is faster. Compiling XFree86 and KDE sure does take a while though. I let KDE run while I was at work; I got home and found it had compiled successfully, so I fired up the Konqueror Web browser, hoping to see the fastest Web browser in history. It was quick, but didn't render GIFs. A little hunting turned up why: It hadn't configured QT with the -gif option while compiling it. I don't know the legality of a private individual in the United States compiling QT with the option to decode GIFs. Don't you just love software patents?

My mail's working again. My mail server problems seem to be mostly solved. It was indeed a hardware problem--with my Linksys router. My mail server couldn't talk to the outside world, and my Windows boxes couldn't talk to (couldn't even ping) the mail server. But my Web server could. But since my Web server is a Web server, it doesn't have a mail client on it. Oh well. So I pulled the plug on the Linksys router, called it a few names, then plugged it back in. Soon I had a flood of mail, telling me all about how I can make $5K a month online, get high legally, drive my Web counter ballistic, get out of debt... And a really weird one: I love you and I don't want you to die! I had to check that one. Weight-loss spam. Hmm. I guess that spammer doesn't know that if I lost 40 pounds, I probably would die...