Dell E > Dell Inspiron 910 - Updates

This is an update to the previous post about Dell's new ULPC.

*It will be called the Dell Inspiron 910 (no deli jokes anymore ;-] )

*It will ship with Ubuntu 8.04 ! (Or that other proprietary operating system)...

The realease date is set to be around the 22nd of August for $300 (around £160!).

As soon as they are in the UK I am snagging one!

PowerMac + Ubuntu = Server Time!

While on holiday, I was helping my great-uncle out with his study room setup (I ended up saving him a switching of ISP!) and at the end he offered me a Mac that he bought in 2000, that he had replaced and therefore no longer used anymore. He was going to take it to the dump and so I gladly offered to take it back with me.

I took a look inside when back home, and found it was a PowerMac G4 with a 450Mhz PowerPC Processor and about 600mb of RAM (also with two 10GB hard drives). Just to make sure it all worked I fired up an Xubuntu LiveCD and was happy when I saw the familiar layout. Unfortunately, the Mac had just missed OSX and so when I booted from the HD was dissatisfied with the ugly UI that stood before me (I was expecting Aqua!).

After a lot of thought (and disappointment that Apple had made the case so it couldn't be used again) I decided to transform it into a server!

After a short while I had Ubuntu Server PowerPC installed and so I looked at trying to install OpenVZ (a virtualisation option for servers) so if anything went wrong, i still had my server, however after half a day of ploughing through poor PowerPC orientated documentation I took a step back and went to bed.

The next day I found out about an alternative to OpenVZ called VServer. This was much better documented and after about an hour I had it running perfectly :-)

Message of the Story?

If someone offers you an old Mac, kill two birds with one stone:
* Turn it into a server and gain a stylish shelf as well :-)

Big Buck Python

Big Buck Bunny Has been Tango-ized!



I have working on these for short while and so I decided to finally let them out. They are released under GPL, however Big Buck Bunny is (c) copyright Blender Foundation.
If anyone would like to do anything with them, the SVG source is available here:
http://www.web-note.co.uk/big-buck-bunny-tango.svg

On another note, I have been reading a Python book to help me get started coding better with Python. The book is called Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional. I would highly recommend it, as I gives a very comprehensive view of Python, but it is not too challenging to keep up with the book. The author (Magnus Lie Hetland) also includes quite a lot of Monty Python references which is also very entertaining. Hopefully this book will spur me on in my stalled coding state! :-)