TGIF - done!

[altivo]

Well, almost. The conversion was from 14 seats of Windows-based public access computing to 16 seats of Linux-based same. I had 14 seats converted and running by the end of today, so that's an acceptable result. The other two are delayed because of hardware issues (replacement disk drives I ordered this afternoon.)

Monday it all goes public unless they decide to let 'er rip tomorrow in my absence. I think it's going to perform at least as well as the stuff it replaced, but there will be questions of course about differences in the interface.

I rubbed my hands together gleefully this afternoon realizing that we have now completely eliminated a number of software products that existed only to protect helpless Windows from the depredations of the public user. No more DeepFreeze, WinSelect, WinU, Comprise, or Norton Antivirus. The machines converted were about half and half XP and Win98. We now have no running XP except on three machines provided by the Gates Foundation at a large discount. Those have to be left intact for another year or so in fulfillment of the grant. We have Win2000 on two servers and two staff workstations. Another six staff workstations still have Win98SE on them, but two of those will be replaced by XP powerhouses that were freed up in this shakeout. Three more could easily be converted to Linux now if I just press a little bit.

The remaining XP power machine, formerly a public internet access workstation, goes to me for my own use and will, of course, be running Linux. I may just manage to sneak Second Life onto it, I believe it more than meets the requirements for that. I'd rather try WoW, but they have no Linux client. On the other hand, I'll be leaving an XP partition on it so maybe... Prolly I should upgrade the little used machine at the Reference desk to XP. The hardware can handle it, except perhaps the HD is too small. Must check that.

The gray and cold rain continued all night last night, all day today, and even now at dusk it's still dripping. We do need rain, but I could live without temperatures in the 30s. It's May! *Shakes fist at the sky.* You could easily believe it was March except that the trees have leaves on them now and the daffodils are long gone. The apple blossoms were pretty much washed away by this cold and wind, but lilacs hadn't quite opened so they are holding out. And there's more to come soon: blackberry, black cherry, catalpa (favorites of mine) and elderberry.

Comments

[corelog.livejournal.com]

Well done. I salute you.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Poo. Salutes are for military nabobs. Give me a hug. :)

[corelog.livejournal.com]

As you wish it, of course. *hugs you gently*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*hugs back with ear-nuzzles*

That's more like it. :)

[calydor.livejournal.com]

*stares*

You are planning to play World of Warcraft?!

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

We're losing everyone to WoW. Nobody wants to SL with us!

[goldenstallion.livejournal.com]

I'm kinda burned-out on Warcraft. Might try SL, probably not. Bear is very addicted, which keeps him entertained and out of my hair. *giggle*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've heard that you can make actual money designing character imagery for Second Life. ;) I wonder if there's a pegasus on there yet.

On the other hand, I've also heard that some people invest huge amounts of money in it, buying or renting space for various purposes. I don't really know much about how it works.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Getting to the point where you can make actual money is extremely tough, and takes a LOT of commitment, as well as skill both in 3D construction and texture-designing, not to mention mere imagination.

Yes, there are pegasus avatars, both anthro and not, and the way avatar design works you can make any equine avatar a pegasus: Simply purchase or make a set of wings, and wear them. It's that simple.

It'd be fun having you around there, though.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, I wasn't proposing that I'd make money at SL designing. But it's something Steed is capable of doing. ;)

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking SL would be fantastic for making his airship.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I dunno what the constraints are on constructs like that in SL, but you might be right.

It irritates me that both SL and WoW are designed to be so dependent on specific hardware. I realize that WoW is very successful in spite of that, but I really wonder how much ATI and nVidia contributed to "make sure" that the software wouldn't work on anything else.

WoW claims to be usable over a 56Kb line, which good dialup can now do but not mine. SL makes no such claim, so I couldn't even try it out except at work. At work it would have to be on my desktop PC, which presently isn't up to it but the replacement will be. I don't think either WoW or SL can run on most laptops, which is the other option. We have public network jacks available for laptop users. They are bandwidth limited, but even with the limitation you get cable-modem speeds or better, which should be enough. Anyway, neither laptop that I have is anywhere near that powerful. One is a 486 processor and the other is a P1.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

You have to get a bit "technically creative" in building to assemble as few simplistic shapes (called primitives) as you can to achieve pleasing complex objects. All sorts of vehicles (both ground and flyable) have been built, and I don't think his airship is too much more difficult than some of the really complicated vehicles I have seen.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not exactly, no. I couldn't do it at home anyway because of bandwidth. And the game is far too violent for me to enjoy I think. But the artwork is still fascinating. I got to see it in action when Steed and Bear showed it to me last month. I'm curious about why people find it so addictive, aside from the violence. And I'm curious about Second Life too.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

I honestly think you'll find SecondLife (SL) more entertaining in the long run. It is more of a graphical chat world than a game, whereas WoW suffers from the same problem all MMORPGs do:

If you don't participate in PVP and grow uber, you're worthless. And no matter how hard I try, I can't picture you enjoying player vs. player fights. I just can't.

[goldenstallion.livejournal.com]

Hi, Caly.

I have the same problem with WOW. It is a very beautiful world I just want to explore and get wrapped up in. But everywhere you go, something or somebody wants to kill you. Everybody who has played a lot tells me the game does not really even BEGIN until level 60 and I seriously doubt I will ever get that high. I mostly enjoy exploring around and making friends, but, after a while, the friends do not want me to participate because I am not interested in leveling for the pvp etc.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I think it would be fun to play on there with you. Subversive team?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nope. I have no interest in the fighting, only in exploring the landscape. Or better yet, throwing monkey wrenches into the social mechanism, as you watched me do on WS. ;p

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

I think nobody monkeyed WS like I did. :p

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd say you and Tempest were certainly the largest jolts. My approach was more little bits here and there but my longevity was 2+ years until the place shut down. By the end Puma probably hated me as much or more than she did you, but the difference was she never had any single good reason to boot me or ban me. Sort of like the contrast between a 7.5 quake and two years of continuing 3.5s where you never know when the next one will hit or where. ;p

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

She couldn't boot me for any of the existing rules, either, so she kept having to invent new ones, and even they weren't enough ... she locked me into chargen for "subversion" (which she didn't even bother making into a rule, she just made it up) then finally nuked me when I broke out 1 or 2 months later.

I'm the reason she started inventing so many rules that utterly killed the Silver Moon Meadow RP. The wolf-horse alliance versus the pumas brought more players online and roleplaying in the same room than any other event I ever saw on WS. Granted with so many, it was difficult to RP, but a lot of players did have fun. Puma became so raving jealous, she wrote new rules and the semi-regular RP in SMM virtually died. That wasn't enough, she kept doing more and more to the point she choked almost all of the joy in RPing outside of one's own herd/group, driving players to restrict almost all of their RP to their own territories and lock themselves in.

As I recall, anyhow.

[darkhorseman.livejournal.com]

With the dish going in today im wondering if second life will work on it given the delay factor. Course I am affraid of the adiction factor too we have limited bandwith and my workers at the farm already find enough to not do because of being online

[altivo.livejournal.com]

If you try it I'll be curious to know. Satellite is really the only broadband option available here, and even that would require us to put the dish some 80 feet from the house and trench in a cable. Wireless is in the area but we have no sight lines on any towers. DSL and cable are not available at all.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Putting games on a library computer? shame on ye ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've just cut the cost of our public computing services in half, and added 10% capacity at the same time. As long as it continues to go well, I think no one will complain about what I might try during off hours. Obviously I'm not going to play SL while working.

My mate's XP machine at home is capable of SL or WoW. It has the power and the graphics card, but we have only dialup that doesn't quite achieve 56Kb because the phone lines are not so great. And my own machines at home don't have the graphics processing power needed, I think. Our upgrade from old Compaqs to new Dell equipment in the last year did boost our dialup speed from 24-28 Kbps to a typical 38-40, but that's still pretty lame these days.

Library equipment wouldn't have nVidia graphics either if I'd been directing the purchase that brought in the last five new machines. It's wasted on what we do. Those machines were spec'd by the consulting firm that we just quit paying this month (also my doing, took me three years to cut them off) and they always go for top of the line everything. Had we followed their initial recommendation (which the boss would have done without my arm twisting) the budget would have afforded only three machines. I managed to back the spec down enough to get five machines instead for the same money.

All five were deployed to replace our five public internet access stations (which did indeed need an upgrade.) However, the changes that went into effect this month free three of them up because this year's computer budget went to buy a single server solution that uses Linux with multiple monitors and USB keyboards/mice. It's amazing, even to me, and I am very familiar with the increased efficiency of 'NIX over Windows. We have five workstations now all running off a single PC, with the same throughput as five separate P4 processors. Back to the mainframe, folks!

Best of all, I can administer this arrangement remotely, even from home if need be, and we now have full control of the user authentication process too. The old system was all proprietary and buggy.

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

Pretty impressive feat there. Sounds like some good experience too.

I still find the the whole LiveCD thing to be quite awesome. One Knoppix DVD replaces literally thousands of dollars of MS software. It's a little slow running off a DVD. But still...

Just goes to show the power of Linux.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

So install it on the HD. Disk space is cheap.

Knoppix hasn't impressed me. That live CD has failed in every piece of hardware I've tried it in, because it doesn't recognize the network card, or the video chipset, or always some piece of hardware or other.

I know most distributions have equivalent live CD stuff now, but I haven't bothered. I've used Slackware since about 1991, so I just stick with it.

You mentioned before my "powers of persuasion" and really it's not that hard. I won the switchover on pure spreadsheet numbers. A 50% cost reduction while providing the same services convinced not only the library director (who fears new technology of any sort) but the library board members (who generally fear anything that is unusual or out of the mainstream.) Though I have to admit that a couple of the board members actually had heard of Linux before, and in a favorable context, which was a surprise to me.

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you've had so much trouble with Knoppix. I've had the opposite experience it and my hardware. But that just underscores the variety of hardware out there. The nice thing is that with so much choice in Linux distributions, you can just keep trying them until you find one that works.

Since you've been using Slackware for so long though, I'm sure your perspective will be quite a bit different. I don't have anywhere near that kind of experience with it yet.

I'm trying to convince my boss to let me start an R&D project using either Linux, RT-Linux, or QNX as the OS for the controls and data acquisition. But MS is still king in that particular environment.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Knoppix most often seems to die on the video drivers. It tries one or two and then just freezes up. Since I'm not a gamer, I tend to have whatever the stock motherboard video arrangement is, not the latest top of the line expensive graphics crunching cards. My main home PC right now is a Dell with Intel chipset, including i865 video. Performs perfectly with Slackware or RedHat, but Knoppix chokes up on it and can't recognize it.

I haven't tried Ubuntu or any of the others.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Sounds like job security to me.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I might have said that once as well. But the previous library I was at, the college one, still managed to push me out even after I did much the same for them. The trick there was that the director I was working for retired. The woman they put in to replace her was both a control freak and afraid of anything unusual. She was very much afraid of me and immediately took action to neutralize my "powers" by taking responsibility away from me. Once she managed to totally redefine my job to only the stuff that didn't interest me plus a lot of ass-kissing and pointless report-writing, I quit, which of course was just what she wanted, but I still would never have stayed after that.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Yes but they never remember all that when they catch you gaming ;)

[pioneer11.livejournal.com]

Plus two is goodly, thats one for me to sit at quietly reading
about Mythbusters or something.

You should really write this all up in a "Why I Use Linux" thing. Maybe
you could get a grant from Red Hat or IBM.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There've been a number of such articles in the library journals over the past few years. Sadly, the entrenched resistance to Linux or BSD has nothing to do with practicality though. It's based either on fear of the unknown or the belief that nothing that costs less or is free could be as good as an overpriced but name-brand product.