Sat Oct 6 19:53:54 PDT 2007

The laptop I bought off eBay arrived at work on Wednesday…which is my day at home with Arlo. Thursday I was off sick with flu. Yesterday I was back at work and slashing open the box it came in, eager to see what I'd got.

Well, I already knew: it's a Dell C400. 12" screen, 1.2GHz P3 (but running at 800MHz with SpeedStep and all), 256MB RAM and a 30GB drive. Not a whole lot of memory, and a bigger hard drive would always be nice, but I can always upgrade. There's no CD drive in this thing, and I hadn't plumped for the docking station, so I set up PXE booting to install Debian. It was a trifle slow, but it worked! (Especially the second time, after I'd accidentally overwritten Debian trying to install OpenBSD on another partition. :-)

I'm surprised at how much Just Works in this thing: X.org (no configuration needed, just start up XDM…man, that's nice), suspend-to-disk, ethernet (well, it's a 3c905; what do you expect?). Even the battery, which I'd written off in advance, appears to hold a decent charge — about four hours so far. The one thing that's dicy is the onboard wireless, a Dell 1370 from everybody's favourite company. But again, I'd written that off in advance.

Next up: I've ordered the OpenBSD 4.2 CD set, so I'll be installing that once it arrives. And Noah has shown the way to longer battery life; I'm getting my 2.6.22 kernel now from Backports. (Oh, the shame of not compiling my own kernel…)

On another note, I think someone had one too many Dilbert moments:

$ dig newcastle.edu.au mx

; <<>> DiG 8.3 <<>> newcastle.edu.au mx
;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch
;; got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 2
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4
;; QUERY SECTION:
;;      newcastle.edu.au, type = MX, class = IN

;; ANSWER SECTION:
newcastle.edu.au.       11h59m12s IN MX  10 proactive.newcastle.edu.au.
newcastle.edu.au.       11h59m12s IN MX  10 synergy.newcastle.edu.au.

Perhaps they got the names from /dev/bollocks.

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