I was thinking about starting a FreeGeek in Tucson. Then I discovered that something similar already exists here – only they're a Microsoft Registered Refurbisher, and they load their refurbished machines with Windows XP.

I hoped that they simply hadn't considered Linux, or considered it but lacked the expertise to promote it. But they have. In fact, they have a regular volunteer who installs Linux for the few customers who want it. And that's the problem: nobody wants it. Tucson isn't geeks; Tucson is blue collar.

So even though I think they're doing their customers a huge disservice by not pushing Linux, I feel that changing their minds would be an extremely hard sell. Not only that, but the marginal gain would be minimal compared to the marginal gain of starting a recycling center where none existed before. It just isn't worth it.

So, on to my next idea.

The real bummer is that I wouldn't even feel right about volunteering in their recycling center, because it's also a work transition program for COPE Community Services. So I'd be taking a volunteer opportunity away from someone in a rehab program. :-/

I've had my 1015T for about three days, and I'm super happy with it. I blew away Windows 7 Starter (and its restore partition) and installed Xubuntu 10.10 AMD64 before I even left the store.

The installation went off without a hitch. The folks at Hi-Tech Computers, where I bought the machine, kindly let me use their USB optical drive. Booting the Xubuntu Live CD was simply a matter of holding the Esc key during boot and selecting the USB boot device.

The wifi, webcam, microphone, multi-touch trackpad, and ATI graphics drivers work flawlessly. I have not yet tested sound playback, for lack of hardware to play it from, but I assume it works since the mic on the same sound device works. (I tested the mic by recording in Audacity and viewing the waveform.) I have also not yet tried to play HD video through the HDMI port. However, the HDMI device is detected, and its mixer is on the list.

My only complaint is that the sensitive area of the touchpad extends too close to the spacebar. I'm constantly brushing against it as I type, causing the cursor to move erratically. I might try putting a narrow piece of black electrical tape over the top portion of it.

Edit: Confirmed that sound playback works. Easiest Linux install ever!

I can't recommend the 1015T enough. Sadly, I've read that its big brother, the 1215T, uses a Broadcom wifi chipset instead of Atheros. It's been a couple years since I tried to get Linux to play nice with Broadcom, so maybe things are different now... but be wary.

Edit 2: This thing has speakers?! I didn't think it did. They're inside the front of the handrest area, and play out of the cooling air intake grilles. Neat.

Edit 3: Since I use a USB mouse most of the time, I simply disable the trackpad with synclient TouchpadOff=1. GNOME apparently has a feature that disables the trackpad when you're typing, but I'm not installing GNOME just for that.

I installed Xubuntu 10.04 yesterday. I am in love with XFCE.

Just a couple minor problems with the installation. Wifi was super flaky until I plugged into ethernet and got all the latest updates. And there was no sound until I installed libsdl1.2debian-alsa.

I love my computer again. There's something very zen about a freshly-installed OS. I almost don't want to muck it up by restoring all my bookmarks and stuff.

Firefox is increasingly bloated and slow, has a multitude of annoying tooltips that can't be disabled, and chokes on HelloQuizzy's JavaScript. Konqueror constantly segfaults, renders things badly, and has no option to never save passwords. Haven't tried Chrome or that other one yet... the one that starts with an 'O'. Whatever.

Meh. Browsers suck.

I got MIDI working in Master of Magic! kingfissure's suggestion to add my user to the audio group solved the problem with dosemu and aconnect. Here's what finally worked:

$ sudo modprobe snd-virmidi
$ ln -s /dev/snd/midiC2D0 ~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi
$ aconnect 24 128
$ aoss dosemu

midiC2D0 is the virtual MIDI device 24:0. MIDI device 128:0 is the timidity server.

It's gone back to cutting off long PCM sounds after a few seconds. Maybe that can be tweaked. Anyway, It's much better than dosbox!

I may be a step closer to getting MIDI working in dosemu. I learned about aconnect, which sort of pipes data between two MIDI ports. I loaded virmidi and connected it to timidity, then used amidi to write a SysEx file to the virmidi device. It made sound, but it only played a couple notes and then continuously played one note until I disconnected the ports.

Edit: If any MIDI ports are connected, dosemu's boot.log contains this error:

SB: /dev/dsp open failed, Permission denied

...and MoM will not start.

I've been trying to get Master of Magic running in dosemu. After much hair-pulling, I met with partial success by double-wrapping dosemu with padsp and aoss, like so:

$ LD_PRELOAD="$LD_PRELOAD libaoss.so libpulsedsp.so" dosemu -D +S

This made dosemu see the sound card as a SoundBlaster 16 instead of a SoundBlaster 2.0. PCM output works with the game set to "SoundBlaster Pro (later)", but there's still no MIDI and the mixer is disabled. Running with sudo doesn't help.

Edit: I guess Pulse automatically wraps ALSA apps? It works the same if I just run:

$ aoss dosemu

I still can't get MIDI working. I found the correct in-game settings to get data written to ~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi, but neither symlinking that to /dev/midi nor redirecting it into midid outputs anything to the sound card.

I've been using Kubuntu 9.10 for a little over two weeks, and despite a few annoyances, it's been great. Sound and WiFi worked out of the box. My biggest gripes have been with Kopete and Amarok. I ended up replacing Amarok with an older version of itself, and Kopete with Pidgin. Also, Firefox seems sluggish when I have a lot of tabs open, and sometimes tabs lose their ability to be click-dragged and I have to restart the process. But the only time I've ever been forced to restart the system is when I accidentally made a shell script call itself recursively. (I'm sure there's a way out of that. Now that I think about it, I probably should have tried killing the parent process.) So far I haven't had to build anything from source to get things working how I want. They even added Kyoichiro Suda's focus blur plugin to the GIMP plugin registry. And I love how my desktop looks!

I got WoW running nicely on Wine, following the easy directions on WoWWiki. The funny thing is, the UI reports a lower frame rate than on Windows, but it feels much smoother. The character models look sharper in OpenGL, too.

The Wrath beta client even patches itself correctly on Wine. I'm waiting to confirm that it works as well on the live client before I delete my Windows partition.

A couple months ago I acquired three old computers on a dumpster-diving expedition, two P75s and one 486DX-33. The 486 was in a cute mini-tower with the keyboard connector on the side. Some of the drives and SIMMs were missing, but between the three of them I was able to assemble one P75 in a cute case with 32MB RAM and two NICs. It posts OK. I also have a 4X CD-ROM and two hard drives, a 4.3GB and a 212MB, which I haven't tested.

This is going to be my new Linux firewall/router. I'm going to leave the old one where it is, because my folks will complain if I take away their Internet.

The coolest thing about an old P75? It's damn quiet.