KWSN Orbiting Fortress

[Strabo]

My "farm", well it really shouldn't be called a "farm", maybe a small garden, actually just a couple of small windoze boxes. It needs to be upgraded to shrub better. One system at a time.

First is an Acer Aspire 5315-2153 (yea, I know, it aspires to be a computer). Specs are below. It is currently running (I use this term loosely) vista home basic. I have tried for 7 months to like vista, and failed, it needs to go away (sound of toilet flushing). All readers are welcome to insert their own comments re vista here mentally.

Pretty much all this system does is sit there and shrub (I never take it anywhere, me thinks it's at me). I am certain it can be made to shrub more efficiently, but how? I have some ancient experience (read 7+ years & more older, but none more recent) with Linux, a bit with Solaris or what has become Solaris, and a few others (Hey are there any shrubbers that run on CPM? I liked CPM!)( think i'm dating myself)

I have been looking around, considering what to do, oh what to do. Ubuntu or Kubuntu looks kinda good or maybe the new desktop Solaris.
However as I have very limited (read no) experience with shrubbers and what works best with what O/S I decided to ask the Great Council of Experts for their 's.

[Sir Papa Smurph]

I am looking forward to an answer to the question of OS's as I have several dedicated shrubbers that are athlons and are really not energy efficient, for the same relative power I could run a new Quad. But I just won't retire 5 good machines each at ~ 400 per day.


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a.k.a. Licentious of Borg.........Resistance Really is Futile.......
and a Really Hoopy Frood who always knows where his Towel is...

[jonnyv]

[Strabo]

Shrubbing Serendipity Strikes!



OK things like this NEVER happen to me. Bit of a long story but I need to share it here.

Sir Strabo has just aquired a used "emachines" with an AMD Sempron 3400+, 512 MB ram, DVD and DVDRW dives, floppy, mouse , keyboard, speakers, 15" flat panel display, running Linux MINT(a flavor of Linux I was unaware of, but what do I know?). Included were, backup copies of linux MINT, Original XP Pro with SP2 and its Cert of Auth. (never used or registered the seller said), several other backup cd's and a nice nearly new full sized aluminum briefcase. All for the wonderfully low price of $50.00! I was stunned when he told me what he wanted. Had I not known the seller I probably would not have bought it, suspecting it to be stolen, but he had all of the system passwords and the paperwork to show it was his. Must have been ment to be!

Now I might be able to answer my own question! The system is plugged in, up and running. If it ever finishes downloading and installing the 215 updates it says it needs I will be installing BOINC (if I can fiqure out how to do it in Linux - been a long time!) and letting it run.

I think this system should be pretty similar in performance capability (except for ram) as the laptop above.

I think I will let it shrub as is for about 2 weeks(?) then upgrade the ram and let it run another 2 weeks. By then I think I might get a fair baseline to compare.

Crowd chants "Plant more shrubs, Plant more shrubs!" (sound of clapping coconuts in the background)

Oh NO!! I may actually wind up with a small farm! (I'm scaring myself)
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Sir Strabo


Wednesdays are entirely my fault!

[Sir Papa Smurph]

[Strabo]

Well, well, well.

I think (ouch! that hurt) I figured out at least one of the reasons why my Acer Laptop was not planting shrubs as well as I expected it to (which isn't really great to begin with, but every little bit helps). Of course there IS the fact it's an Acer, More it's a laptop, Even worse it's running (or trying to run) Vista, but that's all beside the point. I had the display set to turn off after 30 minutes of inactivity. This is supposed to keep everything running, but save power and the display. What actually was going on was:

1. It did what is was supposed to do kept running and shrubbing about 50% of the time.

2. It kept Vista running and suspended Boinc, with no shrub planting, about 30% of the time.

3. It put Vista to sleep suspending everything about 20% of the time.

I have found no pattern to this (it appears to randomly apply rule 4).

About 39 hours ago I changed the display settings to never turn off and it has played nice since then. I looked around a bit to see if this was a known bug but didn't find anything, didn't look all that hard though. It's probably a combination of Vista, bios, Boinc, and Seti. My not so brilliant work around seems to be working so I'll leave it at that for a while.

Now one good thing that has developed from this is I suspect the bit of the screen saver in Seti@home that is suposed to be displaying calculations on Dopler drift, Guassians, Triplets etc. (the randomly rearanging red blocks with white waves) really is not doing that at all. What it is actually doing is calculating the effect on New York , NY, of the giant tsunami created when Sir Fart rips a big one just off the coast in the Atlantic.


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Sir Strabo


Wednesdays are entirely my fault!

[Sir Papa Smurph]

Ummm, Vista

Nope, Can't help ya and I hope I never can
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a.k.a. Licentious of Borg.........Resistance Really is Futile.......
and a Really Hoopy Frood who always knows where his Towel is...

[Yankton]

If they are going to do nothing but shrub I would suggest a minimal gentoo installation with just enough to run boinc. If you are semi-computer literate you can use the handbook (have it open on a separate computer) and go step by step. Get just the basics and then install boinc. Damn Small Linux might be a good choice also, but I haven't played with that in a while.

If you're not comfortable doing this, an easier way might be to use Fedora. Ubuntu can be ok, but if it's not your normal box it will install a lot of junk that you don't need for a box that will sit in the corner and shrub. Fedora will also but not to as great an extent.

Vista is also a resource hog, if you want to stick with windows you should upgrade vista to xp.

A basic linux console with no frills or gui is the best way to go if it's a dedicated shrubber though. Maximizes the resources on boinc instead of software you won't be using.

[ohiomike]

All I will say about Vista (or XP for that matter) is said by the background I use on my Windoze machine. I'll link to it rather than insert it because it is 1024x768:
Wash Your Hands

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Resident Linux fan and credit ho >My Shrubbers<
Proud member of the "Fry a CPU for breakfast club"

[Yankton]

I agree. I won't touch vista, and I keep an XP machine around (actually on a seperate partition of one my gentoo boxes) to play games, which hopefully will be a non issue as more of them become accessible through wine and hopefully in the future will just be available on linux now that video card manufacturers (ATI at least) will be properly supporting linux.

[ohiomike]

[Yankton]

I have seen mention of it before but I haven't played with it yet. If you like this sort of thing you might also be interested in http://www.haiku-os.org/

[Sir Hamster of Elderberry]

[jbyram2]

Puppy Linux boots off of a flash drive or CD, and runs completely in RAM once loaded. Small and light.
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0.0 Giggly hertzes Folding!
Go Diskless..Pure computing elegance, no frills

The brain I'm wearing makes me eat chocolate and cry!!
Something Completely different

[Yankton]

As for that React-OS, have you run boinc on it yet, and if so does it work? There's a few projects not yet supporting linux, I think I'd rather put a react-os client together than run a windows client.
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Some days are worse than others.