Geeky weekend

Since it rained all weekend up here in Traverse City, I decided this was a good weekend to get a bit geeky and do some computer stuff.

First thing I did was install a 1 TB hard drive in the Vista machine (yes, i do have a very good working Windows Vista machine). The machine came with a 160gb hard drive that was about full of podcasts (both the ones I do and the ones I listen to and watch). This is the first time I’ve messed with SATA drives. I was a bit perplexed that Dell put 2 drive bays in but only had a power cable for the second bay and the data cable was only for 1 drive. I wasn’t sure what to do with it.. I went to all the computer stores (Best Buy, Staples, office depot and Radio Shack) to find a double data cable (which I guess they don’t make) I went ahead and bought a single cable because they were cheap and I wasn’t sure if the computer had a place to plug in another one or not.. Well it did and after tweaking a bit in the settings for the bios, it was up and running.

I then decided to download and install Ubuntu 9.04 (just released). I partitioned the new drive with 800gb in NTFS and 200gb in EXT3 (which is Linux) and installed Ubuntu. Now I have a dual boot machine with lots of storage.

Ubuntu installed with no problem and everything worked out of the box. That wasn’t the case the last 3 times I’ve installed linux on this machine. I was never able to get the sound to work right for input and that made it hard to record podcasts on it. This time, the Griffin iMic worked and I’m able to record. Overall I’m happy with ubuntu. I’m going to try to live in it for a while on the desktop (I’m typing this in Ubuntu) Another nice thing is I have access to all my vista files because this version of linux supports NTFS just fine. So I can get to everything I have in windows without using windows.

The rest of the geeky weekend will be spent on the ham radio stuff.. I need to program my shack radio with all the repeaters around here. I’ve had the radio for 3 years and only programed a couple of frequencies in it. I suppose it’s time. Also, I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop for our 15 year old. That will make it harder for him to trash the OS with viruses like he did in vista.

I might even get around to recording a podcast.

Have FUN!
-Mike