Journal thoth's Journal: Revamping home computers
Wow I forgot about the journal facility here, until I looked over my account settings and noticed an "achievement" for it!
I've changed my home systems around a huge amount since my last post, in addition to some life changes like a move or two, new job, etc.
I got a new job over the summer, and decided to celebrate by buying myself a MacBook Pro. See what the other side lives like, so to speak.
As for games, well that's trickier. I'll just mention the ones I play right now. Some are also cross platform - freeciv, wesnoth, dominions 3 (an obscure fantasy turn-based strategy game I like) - including linux. Many are available for mac - Zuma 2, Warcraft 3, Jade Empire, EVE Online, World of Warcraft, Civilization 4 - although only the Blizzard games are nice enough to include windows/mac versions on the same DVD and not make me buy another copy of a game I own (like Civ 4). Some I can play via Codeweaver's CrossOver Games product - Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online, D&D Online - but LoTRO doesn't run that well in CrossOver (low FPS).
So I bit the bullet, and made a bootcamp partition on my Mac. For ~85 GB of space, I now can boot into Vista and run some games I installed there - Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect, Civilization 4, Lord of the Rings Online. (Just to compare FPS, on the Mac via CrossOver I got about 15 FPS in LoTRO; in Vista via Bootcamp, I get about 60). This way I have a nice compromise - Mac for everything except the few games installed on my Vista partition. I also made a Vista virtual machine (yes, I had two legit copies of Vista I had never installed before, so I decided to use them now) and installed a few Windows-only apps onto it, such as CalorieKing, Skymap, and a few gaming utilities for EVE Online - EVE fit tool, and EVEmon.
My previous main computer was a Windows XP MCE going on 4 years old. And over that time, like all Windows installs, it picked up some cruft. Stuff like partially uninstalled apps leaving ghost registry keys, conflicts with various startup and shutdown sequences, apps trying to out-default each other, explorer context-menus out of control. That system had two disks available, so I blew the entire install away and put Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (karmic koala) 64 bit on it, and then tweaked it by adding the apps listed above. It works great! I had a minor install issue getting sound working (had to click a checkbox) and other than that, it is working great. I also configured samba to share out a directory for some common files.
I tried to install XP in a dual boot config, but XP didn't recognize the network card. I bought that system pre-installed, and had no extra disks (or maybe I did but they were lost in a move) with drivers to try. I decided to chuck it, after all Linux recognized the network card just fine, and instead went with OpenSolaris. Unfortunately, that wouldn't boot either because (I think) Ubuntu's grub boot loader doesn't recognize ZFS. I can fiddle with a few "under the hood" settings, but I'm not good enough to hack the boot loader. So... I just formatted that extra disk ext4 and have that much more room for Ubuntu.
I used to have multiple Windows machines, and now over time have migrated to a situation where I have no machine that boots Windows as the primary OS. I'm not philosophically opposed to Windows or Microsoft or anything like that; I'm just trying to get more cross-platform experience. Plus, my new job is a lot more cross-platform than others I've had... more on that another time.
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Revamping home computers
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