Which machine? It is like juggling...

[miriam_e]

I bought a 300GB drive yesterday. Which machine should I put it into? And should I do a clean install or copy over the existing system?

My 3 main desktop machines:

1. my aging Pentium 400MHz machine running Win98
   12GB boot drive (2 partitions: 10GB boot, 2GB programs)
   38GB drive (2 partitions: 37GB Linux /, 200MB linux swap, 900MB win98swap)
   120GB drive (2 partitions: 60GB data, 60GB data)
   
   
2. my 933MHz Win98 machine running Win98
   20GB drive (3 partitions: 9.7GB boot, 8.3GB programs, 900MB win98swap)
   120GB data drive
   
   
3. my 2.4GHz Linux machine
   120GB drive
   120GB drive
   

(1) The old 400MHz Pentium also ran Linux before I accidentally trashed that partition a little while ago with some experiments I was doing. I'd like to convert that machine completely to Linux because it is currently the machine I use to connect to the internet, and it's dangerous to use MSWindows on the net (sooner or later some moron will develop a really dangerous virus to attack MSWindows). This machine is also one of my main archive machines, which is a stupid thing to do on an MSWindows machine connected to the net. Being an old slow machine with such large hard drives, when MSWindows crashes (as it does regularly) it takes more than half an hour to run diskscan so that it can start up again. If I keep MSWindows on this machine then this situation would dramatically worsen if the new drive used MSWindows VFAT filing system (re-booting could get to more than an hour). Not sure why I partitioned the 120GB drive in half... I have a feeling the BIOS might not be able to see giant drives. If that is so that would certainly argue against the 300GB drive going on this machine.

(2) The 933MHz Pentium is a recent rebuild. The system got so corrupted I needed to wipe everything and completely re-install Windows98, which I need for the work I do. I refuse to buy the slow, bloated spyware that is WinXP.

(3) The 2.4GHz Linux machine is now my main storage machine and I'd like to use it for my work, but it is kinda scary having all that data waiting to get trashed by a crazy program. Linux can see the Windows machines, but they can't see the Linux machine, which is annoying.

Conclusions

I should use a Linux machine for the internet. It doesn't need to be fast, so the 400MHz machine, using Puppy Linux, would be good for that. Also it is dumb to have too much storage on that machine, so I should probably cut that machine down somewhat, to a minimal installation.

I need a big storage machine separated from the internet and work. The 933MHz machine is best for that, and it makes sense for it to use Linux, which is safer than MSWindows.

The nice, fast 2.4GHz machine should become my main work machine, so I should install Win98 on it as well as Linux. I wonder if it is worthwhile move a lot of the storage off it to protect the data.

So over the next few days, of the 3 desktop machines I should end up with just one running MSWindows, and even that will only be partial. Almost everything will be Linux. I'm glad. I've been wanting to get to this for some time.

Comments

[flemco.livejournal.com]

Just curious: Why win98? I'm actually a fan of that OS, especially when installed on a newer, faster PC, but given a choice I would definitely go for Win2K.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

It is purely practicality. I already own a copy of Win98 and have a massive number of tools that work under it. If I could get everything to work under Linux instead then I'd kiss Win98 goodbye forever. I'm deeply suspicious of Microsoft. They have done too many truly evil things to consider trusting with something as important as my livelihood. I'll never buy another OS from them. I'm not terribly keen on Linux, but it is much safer than MSWindows. I have been casting around a lot lately trying to find a really safe, fast, reliable OS, but they are almost non-existent.

Most Linuxes are becoming slow and unreliable. My favorite Linux has become Puppy Linux which is extremely fast and small.

Each new MSWindows is slower than the previous, and with the latest ones designed to spy on users and open to ridiculous security breaches, I consider them out of the question (Win98 and Win2k may have been the last safe ones, with Win2k the better of the two).

AmigaOS is extremely friendly and fast, but its networking pretty-much sucks.

BSD works well, I'm told by a number of my friends, but I have no experience with it and kinda doubt it has all the tools I like (GIMP, Audacity, Kate, xmms, xine, seamonkey, etc) that are available on Linux.

I'd love to use OS-9 but I don't have years of time to port all the stuff I like to it. OS-9 (not the Macintosh thing) is a multi-user, multitasking operating system for the 6809 16-bit chip. The chip is the sexiest thing ever made (in my opinion). OS-9 has a lot of advantages over current "modern" operating systems. As well as being miniscule in size it is incredibly fast and is very modular and simple to use.

I should find out more about Hurd... It has a lot of nice qualities, but the same point as that for BSD applies.

Things have been pretty quiet lately, but don't be deceived. Sooner or later some fuckwit will release a virus that will do terrific damage to the bulk of MSWindows machines on the net. Virus alerts and virus checkers won't help. A virus could spread to the majority of net-connected machines around the world in just 15 minutes. Downloading the latest anti-virus definitions will be way too late. The only safe way is to use an OS that no virus is going to target.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

By the way, I use OpenBSD. I have installed on it GIMP, amongst others, for example. There are packages for GNOME (2.10), KDE, xine and xmms, and there should be packages for Audacity as well.

I'm loath to put Linux in the same basket as Unix, but anything written (portably) for Linux should run without difficulty on a BSD.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

video hardware acceleration? (imperative if I'm to use it for VR work)

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

That is dependent on what video card you use and how it is supported. All 'nix-type systems use the X Window System, so hardware acceleration is dependent on the support that X itself has for acceleration. X's support I don't know much about, not needing to concern myself with it all that much.

As you may already know having used Linux, you can get better driver support and acceleration (IIRC) if you use Linux-specific binary blob drivers, but they are a Bad Thing, for many many reasons: one being that they are not portable.

It is not really the fault of Linux or BSD or whatever free software you use: if the graphics card manufacturers don't release decent documentation, you can't really do much with the lump of silicon in your computer.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... this is a little discouraging:
http://www.2cpu.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-45461.html

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

Network them together. Have your gateway on a Linux machine. Use one computer as a file server (not the gateway). Use the others as "terminals".

Just 2c ;)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yep, all my computers are networked together... even the Amiga!

Hmmm... I just typed out a reply and then realised the subtle difference between what you mean and what I was thinking. You're saying that the internet machine almost never needs to get its keyboard touched of screen turned on -- that after boot-up, the screen could be switched off and the keyboard put aside. The same with the big file server machine. I would use the fast work-horse machine, not only for writing, art, and world-building, but also internet access (transparently via the gateway machine), and would also transparently access stuff held on the file server.

Neat solution!

Don't know why I didn't think of it like that. Instead of using 3 machines that are networked, I just need to use one, accessing the 3 sets of resources.

Thank you!

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I say 3 machines, even though there are 6 because the others don't have universal, easy networking or else don't get connected often.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

Right. You use a single computer and access the resources on each computer remotely. If you leave your computers on continuously, you wouldn't even have to touch them at all, you can just maintain them if need be remotely through the network.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

My solution is to use one machine as a file server running Linux. My two largest drives are just massive directories on my file server, both shared via samba so that all my Win98 machines can see them too. As the file server does nothing but serve files, it seldom uses >10% of its (Celeron/433) CPU. (Admittedly, it does have an ATA/100 card, since the MB is only ATA/33. Picked the card up for a few bucks on ebay.)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

It definitely seems to be the way to go.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

Certainly gets around the scandisk issue. My 20GB Win98 drive has about 4GB used on it (among its 3 partitions). It takes maybe a minute for a full scandisk, and somewhat less to just do c: (which is a 2GB partition). The majority of files are over on the Linux box on ext3 filesystems.