Days of our lives

My days tend to run in one of two directions: hardware and software.

Yesterday was a hardware day. I have a house full of old computers liberated — okay rescued, actually — from my employer, who was going to put them on a pallet and send them to some dump somewhere — and I had to do something with them. So I sorted out which worked and which didn’t, which could take distros and which couldn’t, and so on.

Admittedly, these are very old machines — IBM PL series boxes, but some that actually work with distros like AntiX (pronounced “antiques”) Mepis and Fluxbuntu.

The day before was a software day. At the urging of a Cabrillo LUG colleague, I tried Mandriva 2008 and found it pretty interesting. What I liked about it is that it connected to both wireless and ethernet connections fairly easily. What I didn’t like about it is that it took over my machine (to say nothing of a plethora of proprietary software that comes with it . . . hmph).

Tomorrow: A software day, filled with tests of dbEntrance.
(Larry Cafiero, editor/publisher of Open Source and Free Software Reporter, is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)