Slow day at work, and lots of obsolete hardware. What's an OS geek to do?

Finally succeeded in installing Gentoo yesterday. I believe this was the third attempt.

Congrats!

XFCE, or parts of it, is a good choice for a first DE on Gentoo; that's what I picked last time I tried it. A lot of it is kind of small, compiles relatively quickly, and the pieces aren't too tightly coupled.

Here's LinuxMint Xfce and I'm following suit with the penguin theme.

Yeah, XFCE is always my go-to DE, whether I'm using Slackware, OpenBSD, and now, Gentoo. I simply can't stomach Gnome, and while I do like KDE, it's just too much. Although I did have Plasma5 using only 300MB on a fresh boot, idling, with Slackware -current. Occasionally I'll forgo the DE altogether, and use fluxbox, jwm, cwm, or spectrwm.

My new OpenIndiana box with Mate and Rhythmbox playing the radio:

Cool, good to see more people getting behind this project. What hardware did you install it on, one of the ThinkPads? I was having issues installing OpenIndiana on my Dell Optiplex 980 desktop box, I think due to UEFI. I'll have to research the issue more.

Hi JWJones,

I'm using a Win7 era Gateway/Acer clone NV53A laptop with AMD Phenom II X 3 N880 CPU, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 graphics, 4GB RAM and 500GB HDD. It uses ZFS but seems to be doing fine with 4GB RAM at 1684MB free as I type. It does appear to be using more swap than BSD, but I've only used ZFS once before and briefly at that so I'm not schooled in it.

I've used BSD for 13 years but this is my first time using OpenIndiana and I just set it up over the past day. It's different in command syntax and has what I see as its quirks, but I'm happy just to get a box up and running.

I've got spare HDD's for my Thinkpads and plan on swapping one out before long and making a Solaris 11.3 box, too. I picked up a copy of the OpenSolaris Bible for under $5 on ebay and plan on reading it cover to cover when it arrives.

The UNIX bug bit me a long time ago. :)

I just picked up a very clean, almost new looking ThinkPad T61 (my second) from ebay, 3GB RAM, no HDD. Also bought RAM to max it out to 8GB, and a 500GB HDD. Can't wait to take delivery. The T61 is probably my favorite ThinkPad.

Haha, I also picked up a copy of the OpenSolaris Bible, and Pro OpenSolaris, for about $4 each on ebay. Both good books.

Yeah, the UNIX bug bit me a long time ago, too, particularly after I read In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson (1999). :thumbsup:

Did you buy the RAM on ebay? I bought 4GB x2 of NEMIX PC2-5300 DDR2 667MHz RAM and must have got a bad stick because I couldn't get either of my T61 or my X61 to boot with 8GB or 6GB, using one of their sticks.

The T61 is my favorite, too, and both mine currently run FreeBSD. I have an IBM T43 and Lenovo W520 each running OpenBSD 6.2 but prefer my T61 with 15.4" WSXGA+ widescreen. The X61 runs FreeBSD and serves as my dedicated .mp3 player. The T43 is my text editor.


I must have watched too much sci-fi as a youngster or Wargames one too many times, because my idea of "real computing" has always been sitting at the login terminal working from there. Even before I ever used computers so UNIX has real appeal to me. When rebuilding my FreeBSD boxen I never boot to the desktop till I've complied all my programs from ports and edited docs using ee.

I did buy the RAM on ebay, two 4GB DDR2-800 PC2-6400 200-Pin sticks from two different sellers, although both are Crucial RAM (always had good luck with that brand). Fingers crossed!

Yeah, same here. Started out with computers on an Apple II back in 1977. Also watched too much sci-fi, Wargames, and cheesy hacker movies. I also don't "startx" until everything is in place/updated/etc. (Slackware and OpenBSD). I have a i386 Slackware box here at work that doesn't even have Xorg installed, all CLI only. Good fun!

The first computer I used was an Apple II in 1993. They had one at a place I started work, gave me my own floppy disk like I knew what I was doing, and there was no way I was going to tell them I had never touched one before.

My experience with menus from playing video games was instrumental in me figuring it out. When they upgraded to a new one I had to set it up and show them how to boot it up, as you had to flip-the-floppy during the boot cycle on this one.

I've never taken a computer class in my life and everything I know about computers is from reading or hands-on trial and error. I'm still learning. :)

My Solaris 11.3 box running on my new Thinkpad T400 with Intel Core2 Duo P8600 @ 2.4GHz, Crucial 8GB RAM, WD Scorpio Black 250GB HDD @ 7200RPM, Intel GMA 4500MHD and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 integrated graphics and 14.1" WXGA display with LED backlight @ 1280x800.

I'm running the OpenBSD pf firewall on it, too, which is what I run on all my BSD boxen.

Chromebook Linux Laptop. Not Crouton.

https://thumb.ibb.co/dH71cn/acer_c710.jpg

Now that is an Absolutely Fabulous Wallpaper. Where did you get it and could you post a link if possible please.

Edit:No to worry as have followed the link and saved the JPG to /usr/share/wallpaper

This site is what I used. I think they are OK to use as wallpapers because of

http://www.outdoor-photos.com/keywords/panorama?skip=20

I think the name is fairy desert.

I like using the panorama tag

http://www.outdoor-photos.com/keywords/panorama