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Ubuntu Linux
Gentoo Linux
OpenBSB
Familiar Linux and Debian Linux chrootRetired / Past
FreeBSDHistory
Early
First there was a black and yellow 286 with DOS. Then a CGA or EGA 286. I remember a computer that had to be upgraded from 2 megs of ram to 8 for a birthday so I could play Warcraft. I remember dos, windows 3.1, then windows 95.
1999
In 1999 my family bought Crash which was the new family computer. They kept the windows 95 box around too for a while but it was old and rickety.
2001
By the summer of 2001 it was dead but I was also given a friend's dead computer and between the two of them I made Holly, the first computer that was ever wholly mine, and my first Linux/BSD box. I tried Mandrake Linux 8.0on the poor machine and it ran it, but painfully slow. I soon moved on to console only FreeBSD. It soon became the first host of mindstab.net.
2002
In the spring of 2002 a friend gave me Frost made from spare parts from his computer class at his school where he was an admin. It became my first real Linux desktop, using Debian Linux and the blackbox window manager. In the summer of 2002 I bought Inferno to become my main desktop computer. Frost was then retired to the position of mindstab.net server which lasted from fall 2002 - winter 2004. Holly then became a testbed of sorts. In the fall of 2002 I bought Maxine, a laptop, for school. The only thing that would reliably install and run on her was OpenBSD. It also had better PCMCIA WiFi network card support than some Linux distros at the time.
2003
2003 only saw some upgrades to Inferno. A new graphics card, new ram, a second harddrive, a DVD drive, a CDRW drive, and by the end of the year a new power supply because the original one burnt out.
2004
In January 2004 I bought Janus from a friend at a networking company to be used as an OS testbed. Holly was harvested for spare parts and what was left was retired. I was able to cram Windows 2000, BeOS PE5, RedHat Linux, Debian Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD onto Janus's cramped 10GB of space. In the summer of 2004 I bought a rackmount server, Kvasir. During the winter of 2004 my ISP started port blocking, killing mindstab.net temporarily as it was hosted from home. Frost became a firewall.
2005
In the spring Kvasir took over the job of mindstab.net host at a colocation facility. In the spring of 2005 Janus was turned into my primary firewall and mindstab.net secondary DNS, and was relegated to a spare backup. The rational for this was that qemu and other emulation software was advanced enough I could move all my OS testing onto Inferno. In the late spring of 2005 Crash was given to me by my family when they upgraded to Snow, a slightly superior windows XP box that was given to them. I put Ubuntu Linux on Crash and started using it as Folding@home fodder. On July 30, 2005, I bought a new laptop, Nika, and retired the failing Maxine. In the fall I jumped on the early adopter bandwagon and pre-ordered a GP2X and recieved it in December. Also in December 2005 my family finally bought a new computer so I then inherited Snow onto which I also put Ubuntu Linux and used occasionally as Folding@home fodder.
2006
In the spring, I put Gentoo Linux on Crash and ran a short lived Quake3 server. Also, Inferno got a third hard drive and was converted to using LVM2 to combine the hard drives into one massive drive. In August, my financing took a turn for the worse, and I downgraded Kvasir from a costly collocation facility to a business line at home. In October Inferno got another ram upgrade. On November 14, 2006, I bought Bast, a second hand Mac G3 to be my alternate arch test box (big endian!). In December, I finally renewed my interest in my GP2X and installed a chrootable Debian environment on it.
2007
In the spring I finally found Ubuntu to have mostly everything I needed and be stable and useful so I replace my Gentoo install with it on Nika. This was the first time I started using Ubuntu on a main computer of mine. In June I donated Snow with a fresh XUbuntu install to a friend who did not have a computer. Over the summer, Frost finally got tossed, in part due to space requirements and in part do to incredible old age and not so usefulness. In August I picked up an IPaq hx4700 (PDA) and installed Familiar Linux on it. It became my ultra portable programming tool with it's foldable keyboard and a Debian chroot with all the programming languages and text editors I need.
In September Nika died, apparently from an electrical system failure. However in December I bought a boxing day replacement, Umbriel on deep discount.
