Lain, Dogbert, Speedy &Kelvin

Dogbert's the one on top. He runs OpenBSD, and is patched for added uptime as you can see. I turned him off after 313 days of uptime, since I suspected the debian install was compromized. I later took him down at 330 for an upgrade.

He's the primary server, for all of my services.

He obviously got its name because Dogbert is my hero (I'm a huge dilbert fan).

Speedy's hidden in the closet. She runs OpenBSD, and acts as a CARP failover (best OpenBSD feature ever!) but is currently off because Dogbert does such a smashing job. Her uptime record was about 760 days, when I turned her off.

Her name is Speedy because of her 132.95 blazing fast MHz and genuine SIMM ram.

Lain's my laptop. She runs Gentoo Linux. I tried Ubuntu for a couple of weeks, but the distro is some kind of practical joke, so it was back to Gentoo. I tried Ubuntu again later (Breezy), which worked well enough and even supported suspend to ram, but it broke irda and suspend to disk, so now it's Gentoo again.

At 2.2GHz, she runs circles around the others in raw processing power. If I don't push her, she'll last about three hours with an additional battery.

Yes, she is named after Lain in Serial Experiments Lain, and she's just as cute!

Four years later: Lain now occationaly has troubles with her disk, refusing to boot from it for a while (LiveCD to the rescue). Her power cord is loose because the case is cracked in many places. The batteries now last 10 minutes on low load. The paint is stripped off where I've kept my hands for four years, and half the keys fall off if I type enthusiastically. I literally love her to bits ^____^

She'll be hard to replace.

Kelvin's my new laptop. He runs Ubuntu, which is no longer a practical joke.

He's clocked at 2.0GHz, which amusingly enough is a downgrade frequencywise. Still, he's faster than Lain even without accounting for his dual 64bit cores. On one battery, he'll last about 1.5 hours.

I went with another ATI because of their great, free drivers and open specs. It turned out that the free drivers didn't support the R500+ series, but the radeonHD project is moving along. The nonfree fglrx drivers aren't great, but they're not nearly as bad as I expected. XVideo support is missing in ubuntu, and had terrible screen tearing issues. A version that did have working XVideo was available, but broke suspending. I can easily live with running mplayer with an opengl output though.

Kelvin also sports a bunch of features I hadn't thought about when upgrading. There's Bluetooth, which is so freakishly much better than IrDA that it's not even funny. And Firewire, which I haven't tested. He even has a wide screen (1680x1050) and virtualization support (which works with kvm, but is slower than kqemu for some reason). And 802.11g with support for monitor mode. And a fingerprint reader, which works, but there's no free verification software that I know of and I probably wouldn't use it anyways. And a SD card reader, which I don't use. And a serial port, which Lain lacked but I never needed for anything, but I now used it for laughs to upload a game to my calculator. And Gigabit ethernet. And DVD-RW. And a SATA disk twice as fast as Lain's IDE. And a 25% increase in USB transfer speeds. And a sound card with hardware mixing. The list goes on and on... well, I think it stops around here, but still, it's awesome.

I totally went with both 64bit and dual core, because it sounded awesome and couldn't be as bad as people complain about. And it totally isn't. Both Gentoo and Ubuntu made 64bit a breeze, and there are plenty of uses for multiple cores. If nothing else (and there's plenty else), it lets me have full disk encryption without loss of performance for single-threaded apps.

He's named after William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, of the temperature scale fame.