Back at the beginning of March, the power adapter for my Apple MacBook (Alyssa) got fried (short on the secondary winding). In addition to that, the harddrives in my self-built tower system kept going offline due to loose controller boards.
My solution? Repurpose an IBM ThinkPad T22 (Mirandra) with Arch Linux and use it until I could get the adapter replaced. Considering that the system could only use half of the available 256MB of RAM available to it due to a flaky module and that I’m more adepth with Arch than I was before, it seemed like my best choice. Her installation of Arch Linux has been kept light (using mpd and ncmpcpp instead of Amarok) to keep from using up the RAM completely and crashing the machine. Mirandra is currently the left most machine in TRIO and is used for managing my calendar and email and playing music through mpd.
During the week that Alyssa was out of commission, my skills in Linux improved immensely. I currently use the terminal more than I use any GUI application. After I got a new power adapter for Alyssa from the Apple Store and bought everything back home, I began work on her. I installed rEFIt to allow for booting multiple operating systems and installed Arch Linux first after that and Mac OS X last. The Arch Linux installation closely resembles the installation on Mirandra with the further addition of larger, heavier programs such as OpenOffice which would allow me to be more productive. Alyssa is currently the right most machine in TRIO and is used for general web surfing, and communicating online via Skype, MSN, IRC or in online chatrooms.
The last machine that I am currently using Andrew was a completely different case altogether as he was to be used as a server, workstation computer and development machine at the same time. Despite this, once I got his hardware in a configuration that would ensure continued operation for years to come, and got Arch Linux installed and working the way I wanted, everything ran smoothly. Andrew’s installation of Arch Linux though similar to Mirandra and Alyssa, is heavily skewed towards compiling and building programs, libraries and packages. He is also the center of TRIO and is my build server, file server, print server and office workstation.
Now what is TRIO? That’s for another post.
