Meet my boxes

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 compromised. I later took him down at 330 for an upgrade.

He was the primary server for all of my services for several years, until he was replaced by a VPS.

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

Speedy's hidden in the closet. She ran OpenBSD, and acted as a CARP failover (best OpenBSD feature ever!) but towards the end she was off because Dogbert did such a smashing job. Her uptime was 760 days when I turned her off.

She doesn't really run anything anymore, but currently has a disk full of DOS games.

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

Lain's my old laptop. She ran 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 it was back to Gentoo again.

At 2.2GHz, she ran circles around the others in raw processing power, and with two batteries and little load, she would last 3 hours.

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

Four years in, Lain had occational troubles with her disk, refusing to boot from it for a while (LiveCD to the rescue). Her power cord was loose because the case is cracked in many places. The batteries lasted 10 minutes on low load. The paint was stripped off where I'd kept my hands for four years, and half the keys fell off if I typed enthusiastically. I literally loved her to bits ^____^

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 and works more than well enough for me. Certainly better than fglrx.

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 brilliant and couldn't be as bad as people said. 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.

Snoopy was my trusty media center for three years. He ran Ubuntu Hardy for the longest time, but I eventually decided to upgrade. Since Hardy to Lucid didn't work well, I upgraded through all versions, finally stopping at Karmic when Lucid turned out to break it. Good times.

He's fairly slow, running Chrono Trigger in zsnes at around 40fps. In recent benchmarking, I found that the VIA C7 CPU used 2200 gigacycles on a job that Lain did in 115, ie 20 times faster per Hz (a good illustration of the megahertz myth). However, he had more than enough power for his main task: playing video!

Thanks to the miracles of hardware scaling, he could run X at 1920x1080, while still playing fullscreen video. Originally spec'ed for a CRT TV however, he had no chance of playing HD.

He ran MythTV, with a set of homemade scripts that sorted new video files into directories as they were downl..magically appeared on the disk. He also had some hacks for playing music with visualizations, completely joystick-controlled emulator gaming, "cheat codes" when pressing certain combinations on the remote, and a multitude of other fancy magic I added over the years.

Eventually though, I had too much money and not enough pixels on my screen, so I wanted to find something that could play games, HD and games in HD.

Woodstock is Snoopy's replacement. With his four 2.8GHz i5 cores and a Radeon HD 5850, he's the closest thing I've had to a gaming box. He'll run Portal at 1920x1080 with 8xAA at 200fps. Yes, I know Portal isn't a demanding game. No, I'll never run anything else.

He's water cooled, to get his ~350W of heat out of the TV cabinet silently. This works out great; even at full load I can't tell if he's on without checking the LEDs. The temperature doesn't go over 55°C. Of course, the cooling cost at much as the hardware itself, but it looks awesome!

Woodstock currently runs Windows 7 "Home Premium N", making it my first Windows Only box. There's nothing quite like trying to configure Windows to make you appreciate the flexibility of Linux! XBMC automagically supports several things I needed hacks for in MythTV, but the rest appears harder to set up. I'm not quite sure how I'll cobble together the features I want, but I'll try to keep an open mind!