The Emperor
I was faced with a tricky problem. In a little over a week, I’m going to Brazil (mostly staying in a place a very long way from the nearest city or town) for three weeks. I think that it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll have any way of connecting my own computer to the internet for most of that time (though I may find the odd cybercafe somewhere), but I still wanted to have a computer with me. I need to take notes, analyse results, read papers and so on, all of which would be much easier with a laptop than without.
But here’s where the problem comes in; I really didn’t want to risk taking my PowerBook. I’m likely to be working in fairly rough conditions, and I’m spending a few days at either end of the trip in Sao Paulo, where there is—-let’s face it—-at least some possibility of the computer being stolen. It’s insured, but I can’t face the disruption of hassle of having to get a new one, recreate my system from backups and so on. And I have to admit that I feel terribly attached to my Mac—-I just didn’t feel that I could put my baby my computer in the line of fire like that.
Then Mr. Bsag had a brainwave; why not set up my ancient and otherwise unused PC laptop (aka ‘Ugly Laptop’) and take that out? It’s also insured, and I wouldn’t be too heartbroken or inconvenienced if it got broken or stolen, nor would I spend my time fretting about it getting scratched. The boy’s a genius.
So I’ve been spending some time getting it all set up. I had been playing with Slax on it, but I wanted to do a proper installation of Linux before travelling. I mentioned before that I’d tried Ubuntu but found video problems during the installation. When the latest version of Ubuntu came out, I tried that and got the same behaviour again. In a moment of inspiration, I tried hitting they keyboard combination to switch between the output for an external monitor and the LCD, and after a cycle, found that the image miraculously refreshed itself properly. So Ubuntu ‘Hoary Hedgehog’ seemed like a good choice for a permanent installation.
This time, everything went perfectly. I think that Ubuntu must—-along with Slax—-be one of the least painful installations I’ve ever done. I went with the defaults the whole way, and the only choices I had to make during installation were my language, time zone and preferred screen resolution—-all very easy. It set up my network connection automatically, and I’ve found that it even hibernates properly, which is something I always used to have trouble with under RedHat. And that was more or less that. It already came with a lot of the software I needed (vim, Firefox, terminals galore and Open Office for those times when you’ve got to read MS Office files), and installing other stuff is very easy with the Debian apt-get command.
The real joy of running a Unix-based system (any Unix-based system) is that a lot of the tools are interchangeable, particularly if you use portable files like plain text, HTML or PDF. I plan to get everything back on to my Mac via my USB key or over the network when I get back.
One of the tasks when setting up a new machine is to choose a hostname. I’ve had a penguin theme for my machines for a while (Rockhopper, Macaroni and so on), so I chose Emperor. He’s got a long way to travel, and there’s a chance that he might not come back—-it seemed appropriate, somehow.
