Another Fun Night

The MacBook battery died.  That's $150 to replace it including tax.  Unfortunately the MacBook is falling apart and probably won't last another year or two to see a new battery worn down.  No sense in throwing away money there.  To top it off, my desktop machine's monitor, an old CRT, is starting to go permanently unfocused on anything above 80x25 text mode.  I could spend $200 to $400 on a new LCD, but I rarely use the machine.  Ultimately I was looking at blowing $500 on a laptop that could die at any moment and a monitor I'll rarely use.  It's shameful to leave that nice, fast desktop machine wasted simply because I didn't have a lesser machine to play WoW and run FontLab and some actual windows-only apps, mainly games.

I was looking at cheap pc laptops at the various generic box-shaped depot-mart stores and noticed there are some rather nice large laptops with decent keyboards, dual and quad core cpus, 4GB RAM or more, two hard drives, blu-ray, and all sorts of nice toys.  Even better, they often have CPUs that support hardware-assisted virtualization.  This is necessary so I can get all the joys of running Windows 7, which I had no intention of wiping from the box, and Linux, and FreeBSD, and Plan 9, and whatever else I can throw on there too.  I found an HP Pavilon dv7 that looked nice, under $1000 after tax. 

After putting Windows 7 Home Premium through a few tests, and actually liking it, I downloaded VMware Workstation so I could run CentOS to play around with that Common Lisp webCMS I've been allegedly working on.  Windows 7 is what Vista would have been had Microsoft had another couple of years after they realized that Longhorn was too ambitious.  While I can't judge their actual code, the end result shows that somebody actually thought to check that whole "does it really work" thing.  I have to admit I'm not certain if its a real improvement or if Vista was such a horrendous hunk of crap that my standards have sunk further than NBC's rapport with rabid Conan fans. 

Ultimately I'm using Windows to run Linux.  The VMware setup is better than dual booting as it's possible to run both OSs at the same and even integrate apps from the linux desktop with windows.  It's a rather comfortable setup.  Not only that, I have SecureCRT on windows for most of my ssh sessions which is better than an xterm+ssh most of the time.  Even with out the Unity magic, the vmware tools make X behave quite well inside the vmware console.  It transparently captures input, most of the time.  It's not perfect and occasionally focus will switch from X to the Windows desktop, and sometimes that happens while typing so you get a screen full of repeated letters.  Same goes with Unity and its occasionally weird color issues.  This entire week I've used the laptop at work 95% of the time as XenCenter, the management console for XenServer, our chosen virtualization system at work, is Windows-only and my old netbook just doesn't cut it for long term use even with a real keyboard and monitor attached.

Back to tonight, I used the external hard drive I purchased around Christmas and finished the backups on my old desktop machine as well as synced up files I care about from that and the laptop, and got the MacBook in the mix as well.  After that, I installed VMware ESXi on the old desktop.  Dual dual core 2.6GHz CPUs, 4GB of ram, two 500GB disks, and that's about it.  I need to get a low end video card for the machine instead of the space heater that's in there now.  Also I could use four 1TB or larger disks for more storage.  And replace that 4GB with 8GB.  It's going to cost about $600 to get the machine into the desired state, but it is 100% usable now.  As soon as I reimplement the services from the two existing machines onto this one, I'll take it to the colo.

Watched the last Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien.  Wasn't disappointed.  Fallon's and The Roots' tribute at the start of Late Night was nice.  Unfortunately I missed The Late Late Show's commentary as I had The Mighty Boosh set to a higher priority than Ferguson.  Missed the MythBusters.  While I was at it, changed the DVR to start recording Letterman instead of Tonight Show reruns.

This post ended up taking longer than expected as I got sidetracked on getting my first freebsd vm setup.  Went through almost all packages looking for new, neat stuff.  This is going to be my personal shell/home vm, so it must be quite featureful.