So I´m posting right now from Puppy Linux running on my old P3 HP Pavillion. It was my hope several months ago to have this thing up and running sooner but I was having all kinds of issues with the graphics and getting it hooked up to my TV so I just kind of gave up for a while. Now though I´ve got it up and running using my new monitor. It is nice to finally have a crack at it. My goal is to get Ubuntu or Mandrake up and running on it but I was having issues with those so I just wanted to go with something I know works in the mean time to see if it could connect to the net and how well it ran. If everything goes fine, I´ll get Folding@home up and running on it to and start contributing valuable CPU cycles to science!

Anyway, I don´t want anyone to think I´m going all soft and turning my back on Bill so I´ll say a few brief things about how much nicer Microsoft has made my life in the last few days. The greatest thing they have done is to finally add support for the quicktime and h.264 video codecs so I can now stream TONS more media to my Xbox 360 than I could before. What would be even nicer though would be for them to add native support for those codecs to the Zune. I think the Zune is really only a firmware upgrade away from being the most amazing PMP on the market. If they opened up the video support so it included DIVX and opened up the WiFi to allow syncing with your PC and the Zune Marketplace for downloading songs directly to the player, they would be so far ahead of everyone else that it would take a while for them to all catch up. Anyway, I´m ready to give Ubuntu a shot after I once again reformat the hard drive on this old machine so I´m going to get going with that and then head to bed sometime later. Chao!

Filed under: life by Jonathan Assink