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[tlug] Dinosaurs 'R' not us? (Small Linux boxen)



From: "Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>
From: Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>
<snip>
Shannon Jacobs wrote:
I actually have a third Ubuntu machine which is my problem child. I
was thinking of bringing it along to the technical meeting next
week. I hope that is not inappropriate behavior.

Now this sounds cool! I don't know if our officers are against it
but I certainly would be curious to take at seeing the problem
first-hand (and seeing if it can be fixed on the spot).
The only issues I can think of are:
1. It's a pain to carry back and forth to the TLUG meeting
2. Someone doesn't auction it on you at the TLUG auctions ;)

Issue (1) only applies to Shannon (i.e. if he does not mind lugging
his box to and fro, neither do we). Issue (2) is a non-issue, unless
Shannon does not feel like lugging his machine back home. :)

But here is one more issue:

3. Is there a keyboard / mouse / monitor in Wall Street's conference
room that Karim is OK with us using?

I know there is a box in the conference room with k/m/m attached, and
we could certainly unplug them and plug them into Shannon's box for
the duration of the troubleshooting activity, then restore them at the
end. However, we need to make sure this is cool with our hosts first.

Zev, could you maybe check with Karim?

I feel like I've confused the issue, somewhat. While the machine is a problem child, I rather doubt that any of it's problems are that interesting. It's basically just overloaded, and all I was really hoping for was learning how to tweak the configurations to unbundle and remove some of the unneeded components. I don't want to strip it all the way down to a server box, but there's definitely a lot of excess functionality on it. Obvious candidates are screen savers and games, but they seem to be locked into the desktop. I was thinking more along the lines of some post-meeting tweaking.

As possibly amusing background, it's a little hard to describe it's current state, but I'll try a historical approach.... When Dapper Drake was released I discovered that the machine didn't have enough free space to upgrade, so I decided to erase 'some stuff' that seemed unneeded. Kind of like a random lobotomy? This is how you learn? Basically I destroyed about half of the system, though I could still boot to a minimal shell. Per force, I studied some weird documentation and used dpkg to stabilize it and tweaked some configuration files to encourage it to apt-get itself as a Dapper Drake machine, and eventually I succeeded in that. I'm not certain, but it probably has 90% or more of Dapper Drake installed now, and it basically runs without problems--but it's still overleaded and it makes me nervous, so I'd like to slim it down.

With regards to the keyboard and display, that's a non-issue. The machine is just a small ThinkPad, and quite portable. It's already set up for an external monitor, though I should test that under Linux.

Actually, that does remind me of a more interesting project that might be instructive, though I regard it as a low priority. The hardware is capable of dual-head displays, with one desktop on the primary display and a separate desktop on the external monitor. That's how I normally run it under Windows, but I haven't even tried to do it under Linux. It seemed to be possible, but difficult enough that I wasn't eager to tackle it yet. I don't even use the workspaces.

A more difficult but potentially interesting problem to tackle would be related to the USB discussion. I have a Sharp/WillCom WS003SH phone that can (under Windows) work as a wireless modem through the USB port. Again, a low priority for me, but maybe someone else would think it's instructive to work on? My research on that problem suggested that an expert could probably create the required USB device driver fairly quickly--but it's an unusual and rather narrow kind of expertise.



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