October 09, 2011
Reboot the Old Tower
Good morning! We're back from Mass at St. Patricks and breakfast at DFE. Timothy served with Claire and it was my first time lectoring in 6 or 7 years. I dropped Claire off at work afterwards. Timothy and I are getting ready to breathe new life into my old ATI PC tower. We found a little nook to put it in the study for him to do more Linux experiments with.
After a thorough cleaning of the dusty old hardware, Timothy and I burnt a DVD with a FreeBSD unix variant called PC-BSD and installed it on that old tower. After updating it we put it back in the corner of the study. I've ordered a WiFi card for it because when it was in use back in my ATI days it was just wired into the network. For a couple of days he'll be able to tinker with it but it won't have Internet access.
Gorgeous weather outside today. Timothy and I sat outside in the screened in porch and enjoyed some good books. When the rest returned from shopping, they pointed out that a doe and her fawn were in the right side yard. We were so busy in our books that we hadn't noticed them behind us. And evidently we didn't scare him off while we were outside.
After dinner I took Claire out for more stick shift transmission training. She only stalled a couple of times when she had to start on an incline. That's to be expected. Afterwards I took her to Rite-Aid so that she could get some new nail supplies.
Timothy was finding too many issues with the BSD install earlier in the day. So after I came back with Claire we wiped the hard disk again and installed ArchBang Linux. That went much easier and is very light on the resources of this older tower. (related link)