Adventures in retrocomputing.

[tyggerjai]

For some reason, recently, I found myself upgrading the Xubuntu install on the main workstation I brought back from China. And all sorts of stuff changed, and the avr-gcc binutils broke (and arduino development is the main thing I use it for now), and generally it sucked. So I put crunchbang ( http://crunchbanglinux.org/ ) on the old Throbbing Beast I still have lying around, which I bought nearly 9 years ago. And immediately I'm just as productive as ever. I should probably upgrade the RAM - it's currently running 1 gig of DDR. But that's about it. Everything else Just Works. I spent the requisite few hours customising - there's no handy XFCE GUI for mapping the logitech keyboard media keys to volume/mp3 player, etc, so I had to actually manually edit the Openbox configs. But Xmodmap already had the keycodes correctly mapped, so at least I only needed to map XF86AudioVolumeDown to the correct amixer command. Conky is rocking my socks, and I've barely even started playing with it. And it's shiny fast, even on 9 year old hardware. It doesn't handle flash videos so well, although YouTube is watchable, but that's about it.

Just goes to show, really. I should probably acknowledge that when I bought the Throbbing Beast it was state-of-the-art - acknowledged overclocker's dream in many ways. I personally bought it second hand, but I ran into the guy I bought it from the other day, and he asked if I still used it. It's kinda nice to be able to say yes, and that it's actually still doing everything I need to do as well as I need it done. I Am Pleased.