Updating Ye Olde Computerboxen.

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Most of the Cigars and Legs series has been written in one of four places: A small notepad I carry with me, a larger notepad I keep in my bag, and the desktop and laptop computers where the works get rendered digitally and most of the actual writing takes place. The computer, a desktop I built for under $600 (shipped!) in January of 2006, is still humming along just fine… but it’s been replaced and is currently being configured to work as a media center in the other room. It can still do quite a lot (especially with some lightweight Linux going on).

The system replacing it has two major goals:

– Be extremely powerful — quad-core processor, 16GB of RAM. This is because I intend to use it for other tasks in the background (fileserver, etc).
– Be extremely energy efficient.

As such, the bulk of the price was a quad-core CPU with a low power use and the most energy efficient PSU I could find. Sure, I could use a raspberry pi, but they’re not as suited to multi-tasking.

One of the things to go away with this machine, however, was Debian Linux. After spending most of a day trying to get either Debian or Slackware to work and access the internet, I gave up. I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition, the latest version, because it is much more friendly toward some of the stupid proprietary firmware in this machine.

One day, all drivers will be free…