All my machines are laptops. I have a fear of desktop machines. There are various practical reasons for having laptops, I am aware that they can be placed against various practical reasons for owning desktops. However, I like laptops.
Toshiba Portege A100, ... Debian.
fluffy is my current baby. I really didn't mean to call him fluffy. The collection of laptops listed below adds up to a lot of hardware, and none of it completely functional. So I set out with a list of requirements like "doesn't weigh much" "isn't black and ugly" and "has a DVD drive and other useful holes and a hard drive". So now I have fluffy. *pats fluffy*. Debian on fluffy
Advent 6412DVD, PIII, 128MB, 20GB. Dual-boot Debian/WinME.
Jodie was the laptop I bought for my second year at Cambridge. I wanted a laptop NOW, in the next hour, and so I bought her from PC World. She did everything I wanted, but she weighs a ton. She was difficult to balance on my knee, and slightly inconvenient for taking about the place. She ran Windows ME for all of my second year, and I found that if she was sitting on the bed, or any soft surface, she'd get too warm and turn off. Laptops with their fans on the underside are conceivably a mistake. During the summer following my second year, I finally got a fully working Linux install on her, and I switched her over to Linux that Christmas. In March 2003 she started to have issues with her power connector, turning herself off and refusing to turn on again. I sent her back and Mastercare put in a new motherboard. She spent three weeks in America, and some time after that I discovered that neither the USB port nor the CD/DVD drive were was working any more. More recently the power problems recurred, and she's doing very little these days.
Toshiba Tecra. PII, 64MB, 4GB. WinXP Pro.
I bought Chloe when I was in a phase of buying laptops from ebay. I forget why, only Morris had died, and Jodie was sick. She has a single pixel-wide green line down the middle of the screen, which doesn't bother me at all, except that occasionally on white text it merges and makes things look like Is when they aren't. She came with XP on, and when I started using her as a spare while Jodie went for repair, I didn't bother changing that. Besides, I was doing a bit of tech support for windows users, and I found having an XP box handy. The thing that had irritated me most about windows in the past, having to reboot every time you change network settings, is gone from XP, and so she never really irritated me. She's still running XP, and I'm not intending to change that in the near future. She's not a particularly smart laptop, and also fairly heavy. She has two pcmcia slots, but no built in ethernet. But she works as a spare, or for windows-only things. And for Annabelle the Sheep.
Toshiba Portege 7010CT. PII, 160MB, 4GB. Debian.
I bought Morris because I wanted something much lighter than Jodie, who didn't really balance on my knee. He came from ebay, with no OS installed, and is a cute baby. These things were really shiny dudes when they first came out, years ago, but he's aging a bit now: 800x600 screen resolution, and a bit slow for everyday use. I only have a floppy drive for him, and he doesn't have built in ethernet, but he detected my PCMCIA card ok, or installing debian would have been a nightmare. He's very slim and light, and the only problem I've had with him involved a full 2-litre jug of water falling over onto him. I left him for a few months, took him apart, left him for a few more months, and put him (mostly) together. I couldn't get the connector for the mouse buttons back in place, unfortunately. Owing to the 800x600, which does bother me, him being a bit slow, the not-too-large hard disk, and a lack of things like CD drives, he got relegated to spare and holidays, and now he refuses to detect his hard drive altogether.
IBM Thinkpad. 486, 12MB, 320MB. FreeBSD. Broken screen.
Sunnie and neb were the first laptops of my sister and I, in 1998 or thereabouts. Sunnie's screen died on her at some stage. I'm not sure exactly what's wrong, I think it may be reparable; it has lots of funny coloured lines all across it, and if you squeeze the connectors in different places it becomes almost possible to see what's going on. Anyway, I plugged in an external monitor and installed BSD on her, having had success with BSD on neb, but I messed up the ssh somehow, and it crashes. So until I plug the monitor in again and fix that, she's not terribly useful.
IBM Thinkpad. 486, 12MB, 320MB. FreeBSD.
I installed text-only FreeBSD on neb because I wanted to experiment with a different OS. It turns out that it's a good thing to install on these dudes; standard debian won't install because of the low memory. I tried slackware on sunnie, but couldn't get it working. Also, BSD is fantastic at detecting the ethernet and wifi cards I've inserted into neb. Neb used to live in my kitchen, so I could IRC while washing up, but I don't have a wireless network in my current flat.
I have two other laptops from ebay that I haven't got around to setting up yet, and thus haven't named. Neither of them have obvious ways of getting network connectivity --- well, they both have modem holes, so I need to find someone on regular (non-AOL) dialup! The first one is a fairly large Vaio. It is an ebay failure, as when it turned up the screen and CD drive weren't working. I should have contacted ebay as well as the seller, but I didn't get around to it. When I plugged in an external monitor I discovered that the laptop is french, has a french keyboard, and a french windows install, the main feature of which is a directory of images called "gaye-sexe". One day I'd like to wipe all that off and install debian. The second one is a small, light, aging thinkpad. It's not got a great deal of processing power or cpu, but otherwise seems like a fairly decent bird. However, again, no floppy, no ethernet, no cd... one day I'll get it a floppy drive and install some sensible OS.
Bytemark virtual machine. 64MB, 3GB. Debian.
I bought a bytemark virtual machine when it became clear that my usage of muse was getting a little heavy for someone who didn't contribute to its upkeep. Besides, muse has disk space issues. The canonical name for this box is flurble.vm.bytemark.co.uk, I guess, but flurble.org and maircrosoft.com both refer to it, and my two websites live there. I'm pushing the disk space a bit (since I got my digital camera and stuck every picture I ever took there), but upgrades are possible. I use my flurble.org login for my main screen session, from which irssi, mail out, ssh out to work or home and so on happen. So whatever I'm doing, I'm almost certainly logged into flurble.org.
Someone else's box, I just have an account there. Debian.
When I lost my SRCF account, owing to not being registered with the uni any more and so on, I wanted somewhere with webspace and things. Some nice quaker geeks let me have an account on muse which was fairly similar to my SRCF account. Later someone introduced me to screen and irssi, and after that I fairly lived there over the summer, until I moved to flurble.org. Muse is a nice place to be, but it tends to be running short on disk space. It's a virtual machine on some real box, and I know very little about its insides.
HP desktop of some sort. Slow, 256MB, 8GB. Win98
Bizzylizzy is the computer my mum bought way back when. She got old and has been moved on.
Compaq Armada E500. PIII?, 256MB, ?20GB. Win98
Chrysanth is the laptop I got my mum to replace bizzylizzy. She's got enough energy to run AOL and other programs without complaining, and my mum was keen on the idea of a laptop (well, they are nice). I bought her from ebay, having had success with ebay in the past with Morris and Chloe, and when she arrived at my house set her up with all the programs my mum might need. She had no problems, so I took her down to Lincoln. She promptly spluttered and died and crashed and refused to boot and complained about doing anything interesting and so on. She seems to be finding her feet a little these days, but things are still a bit iffy.
ubuntu kind of took over from debian. I replaced flwm with jwm and I no longer make much use of multiple desktops--just use one or two extras for things I need to have running and don't need clogging up the taskbar. jwm doesn't play nice with xine fullscreen so I normally open a second graphical vt and run flwm on it for movies. I gave firefox a good go but abandoned it and returned to opera. Emacs still wins and I've quit using it in console-only mode because I like being able to, yknow, click. And why for the love of god why can't I find a terminal I can navigate by clicking. I mean come on surely it's common to write a long command at the prompt and make a typo right in the middle?
I installed debian because someone told me that while it's not necessarily better than other Linuxes, lots of people in Cambridge use Debian, so I can get good support from newsgroups etc. Debian rocks. Apt rocks. I started using Emacs because we got introduced to emacs in 1A courses, got to know it better in the second year, messing around to make it do more of the things I wanted it to do, had a go with vi at the beginning of this year and never came to terms with it, discovered even more useful things emacs can do, and am now a happy emacs user. I have a couple of complaints about it; one is that it demands I have a bunch of x stuff installed even though I'm only going to use it in console mode; as far as I can tell there's no console-only version, and the other is that the colours don't work properly in console mode. I installed flwm on Morris because he was a bit slow and stuff, and I also wanted to conserve battery power as much as possible, and flwm is a *very* lightweight window manager. I got used to it, and got to like it, to the extent that after having fvwm2 installed at work for some time, I downloaded and installed flwm. I daresay I could configure other window managers to behave like flwm, but there's no need to. I did use and like for some time some combination of gnome with afterstep or something, with the docks. I'm still quite keen on having square docks with useful buttons and clock and load display and so on, but I've got used to C-a T for the time now that I use screen for everything, and flwm menus and whatnot. A version of flwm that remembered the things I put in the sticky desktop would really rock. You can start things up when flwm starts, but they all start on the same desktop. And I'm not bothered enough to fix things, especially as I tend to end up doing things using my whole screen anyway, so anything like that gets covered up. I forget why I started using opera. I think it replaced IE for me at the time, so you can understand I thought it rocked. I used it for mail, too. But I never got the hang of the new mail client they brought out with Opera 7. Now I still use opera. I like the 'next' buttons it does in directories. I browse with 'cached images only' and turn on images when I want them. I like all the funking you can do with stylesheets, though I've got less hackery set up than I used to have. I love Ctrl-Alt-V to validate a page. And I like all the usual cool browser features like tabbed browsing and requested popups only.
Oh, what to say about this? I used to have some crazy network setup, and I wrote my original "my setup faq" because all these geeks murmured about me turning up with an AOL IP. Then I had a cable modem. Then I moved to Edinburgh and got another cable modem. Then I got rid of it and now I don't have a net connection. I think that loses me slightly less geek cred than AOL dialup, but I'm not sure.
Last updated May 2005