Finally the new laptop arrives

I just did the first boot on my new laptop this morning, and I'm checking out the corporate supplied hardware/software. The hardware was everything I expected but it has two hard drives installed and the optical drive in an external bay.

The drives are a 320G 7200 rpm with W7 Enterprise 64 bit, and the 500G 7200 rpm is completely empty. It's like they knew what I wanted to do with it :)  I'll pull the 320 completely out and put it in a USB enclosure so I can boot it if I'm completely forced to (and I can put it back in when I ship it back in two years.) I'll move the 500 from the side bay to the internal slot, then move the optical drive to the side bay. 

As long as it's booted I'm taking down display driver info, wireless chip details, display settings, etc. Once I get Debian running I'll need to work through any of these loose ends. Speaking of Debian, I'd hoped by the time I got this PC 6.0 would have been released, but it's not quite there yet... If you remember way back to this post I talked briefly about the Debian release cycle. I've been running "stable" "Lenny" or "5.x" since I started this blog. If 6.0 had been released I could just repeat the installation instructions from before and my default install of "stable" would have been the new version. This is an easy way to get accustomed to Debian.

Since I want to go into "testing" "Squeeze" or "6.0" I'll need to know this link http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/ and use it to find open bugs, pre-release versions of the OS, etc. Who knows maybe I'll even get to find a bug and contribute something to the process. Last thing I need to know before I download my new installation media is that my architecture has changed. Since I want to make full use of my new hardware I need to fetch amd64 instead of i386. This is confusing to some since my CPU is actually made by Intel, but this should clear that up: Debian says Intel EM46T is a supported hardware for the architecture called amd64. Then Intel provides all info of what they classify as EM64T on their webiste. 

Long story short, I'm going to the download page and finding amd64 businesscard CD under the "daily built images" section and getting a fresh version of Debian to try out!

New laptop coming

So with everything running so smooth the last few months I haven't had anything to post, but now my little technology snow globe is getting shaken up!

My trusty Lenovo T60p is due to be retired and I've got a T510 on the way. Now I need to look at what I'm doing and figure out how to best configure my new box to meet my upcoming needs.

I know it has 8Gb of ram and an i5-M540 CPU so I'll need to go 64 bit to make use of it. Also I have some virtual appliances I need to run in VMware Workstation and not my beloved vbox. 

I think it's time to try out Squeeze 64 bit and see how that goes. Needless to say I'll have something new to post about shortly!

xscreensaver, claws-mail, iceweasel, and backups

It's been nearly a month since I've converted back to full time debian and it's been going very well. Ubuntu has released 10.04 and they seem very happy about it, it's exactly what I feared it would be and I'm very glad to be back in control of my own OS. Over the last month I've made three significant changes I'll quickly go over now.

Locking the desktop

Where I work it's required that the desktop is locked or the PC is logged out anytime you aren't in your office. After the first couple hours of closing all programs and logging out of my machine I got pretty tired of reopening all my apps over and over. I searched the internet and easily found exactly what I was looking for.

I did a "aptitude install xscreensaver"and added this to my menu

[exec] (Lock Screen) {xscreensaver-command -lock}

And I found myself back in compliance again.

Email Client

OK I'd planned to use Opera and webmail to get by, but I played with Claws Mail again and got suckered in. I've put my main email account on it and setup my address book.  Normal drill "aptitude install claws-mail" and an add to my menu:

 [exec] (Claws Mail) {/usr/bin/claws-mail} <>

I've got one last thing to figure out regarding masking all addresses when sending to groups, but that will give me something to work on later today.

Another browser

I really love Opera, but I have a few websites that fail on it including my bank. The best choice for me was to just load iceweasel and open it only when I need to. It's another one already in the repos "aptitude install iceweasel" and a menu item:

 [exec] (Iceweasel) {/usr/bin/iceweasel} <> 

If anyone hasn't heard the history of iceweasel/firefox you can start your search for info on the wiki.

Backups!

Since this is just like any other production PC, I booted clean, logged in as root, mounted an external USB drive, and did a copy of my entire /home to that drive in a dated folder. Whatever OS you run, do your backups!

That pretty much wraps up the last month, everything is smooth sailing so I guess it's time to load up squeeze in a vbox and start evaluating that upgrade option.