The “Imperial Command” has recently imposed a lot of new restrictions on what we can access on the Internet from work, so I decided to bypass their network altogether so that I could see what I needed (or wanted!) to see when I’m connected to work during 99% of my weekdays.

There are several ways I could have gone about this. First, I tried to install a light Linux distro on a very old laptop that I had laying around. But the pentium 200 with 256 meg or RAM couldn’t even handle the smallest distro I could find that still let me do what I needed to do. So, I chose to spend a little money and buy an off-lease corporate computer from eBay for $20 and install [url=http://www.xubuntu.org/]Xubuntu[/url] on it. BTW, if you’re interested in getting a second (or third or fourth…) computer, this is a GREAT way to go. I got a Compaq EVO small form factor desktop box with a 1.8 ghz processor, 256 mb RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. These are the same boxes we use in the office of Imperial Command and they get the job done. I added an additional gig of RAM to speed things up a bit. I used a USB KVM switch to connect the keyboard, mouse and monitor (yes, I only have one monitor!) and started installing. The only thing that is making me a little nuts is the loud fan in the new box – it’s got this high-pitched whine that is slowly eating away at my brain! Not sure yet if it’s the PS fan or the CPU fan, but I gotta get that thing quieted down….

Xubuntu has been great. I can’t believe that all these tech pundits are saying that Linux is still not ready for the desktop of the average consumer. The installation was totally painless and I’d say that about 75% of people would probably never have to change the default settings on their machines in order to do everything they generally do with their computers (which I’m guessing is mostly surfing the web and checking email with an occasional document or spreadsheet thrown in. Watching DVDs and most common video formats is enabled by default now, so that’s pretty much a no-brainer.

I’ve been doing a lot of customization so that I can use this as a development and testing box and generally just trying to get up to speed and make sure that I can do everything I can do on a Windows box within this new environment. So far, I’ve not run into too many things that I can’t do in Linux that I could on Windows. I installed [url=www.winehq.org]Wine[/url], but I find that things work better using Linux apps.

[url=http://conky.sourceforge.net/]Conky[/url] is great fun. Check out the screenshot of my desktop below to see my customized Conky setup.