Today, Recapped

You may have noticed that I changed the template to something a little less flashy. Well, something almost nonexistent. You may (or may not) also be wondering where the URL for my blog came from. So I thought I'd talk about that today.

When I was first getting into Linux I was disoriented by the sheer number of distributions available. After I looked through a long list I came across one called Slackware 9.1 (not the Slackware logo I made in the sidebar). The name sounds friendly and easy to use, so I thought I'd give it a shot. It turns out that it's in fact the first, and least user friendly distribution available and gets it's name from the fact that it's so stable you could run it for years with minimal maintenance. So I learned Linux the hard way, and it was the best thing I ever did. The thing I like the best about Slackware is it's minimalism. It doesn't come with a bunch of crap you'll never use and it runs more smoothly than any other OS I've used. So that's what's up with my template.

I also started contributing to SETI@home today. The idea is simple SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) doesn't have nearly enough data crunching power to examine all the information they collect from their satellites and telescopes, so they let other people do it for them. You install a client on your computer, put in an email address, and they start sending data to you a few megabytes at a time. The client software runs in the background and processes the data using your computer's idle cycles, leaving your computer running without a performance hit. When it finishes processing, it sends the data back and retrieves more, and the cycle continues. I think it's a pretty good use of computing power because I've always been interested in SETI and just the universe in general.

In fact, I'm going to set up a SETI server tomorrow using the 166. I think when I figure out how to make the SETI client use all the available processor cycles it'll get more done than just the idle cycles of my laptop. I'm also going to install Slackware 11 on my 333 and start my Linux from Scratch on a separate partition. I think that would be better than installing the starter OS (which is needed because you need certain software to compile the same certain software), then installing LFS and then removing the original partition.