IT Professionals

Beating Old PCs Into Submission

Posted by on Apr 6, 2009 | 11 Comments

Over the past week or so, I have been undertaking various small projects to help me deal with the stress of some recent personal events. Because I am a geek at heart, this has translated into reworking old PCs into something that will help to further radiate my household into what will likely end up resembling a poor-man’s microwave with all of the EM going back and forth right now.

But in all seriousness, I have found that by utilizing one of these bad boys. The eBox 4854 (Zonbu Mini) has provided me with the perfect means of both streaming my webcam over Ustream 24/7 just for giggles in addition to also creating an internal and well protected POPFile server for my own use here at the home office.

What has totally blow me away is how stable it has proven to be running a Compact Flash card in place of a standard hard drive. And while I am sure it would do just fine with Windows, I have found it is running really well with the LTS release of Ubuntu (8.04) as I wanted something that was going to be stable enough for long term use.

So while I have yet to SSH into my Chumby, I have been able to save a lot of wasted PC usage with something that is using a whole heck of a lot less power. Suppose my next step is to begin Twittering my wattage hours…

  • Sherman DeForest

    If you have several old computers and Linux, I have a single word for you, “Beowulf”. A geek friend of mine has 32 processors setup so they can directly address each other’s memory and operate in unison. In essence, he built himself a teraflop super computer that he can control from his laptop while sipping wine in his hammock. It lives in his garage. Pretty sobering to think that it is more powerful by far than the machines used to design and simulate nuclear bombs.
    Sherm

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Sherm – To be honest, I am complete awestruck and envious, all at once! :)

  • Alan Monroe

    How much are those eBoxes? I’m not having any luck googling up pricing info on them.

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  • http://twitter.com/PcWindowsOnline PcWindowsOnline

    Vlc player is always going to be the best !! And ubuntu just makes it better :D

    • http://twitter.com/matthartley Matt Hartley

      Agreed :)

  • http://eddieringle.com Eddie Ringle

    s/site/sight

    • http://twitter.com/matthartley Matt Hartley

      Auto-complete ate it and switched the correct usage on me. I fixed it, cache refreshing in a moment.

    • http://chris.pirillo.com/ Chris Pirillo

      What? :)

      • http://eddieringle.com Eddie Ringle

        It’s old Unix-fu, meaning replace the first occurrence of “site” with “sight.”

  • http://twitter.com/SeshormerowCAH Colton Hooke

    VLC is by far my favorite player! Never used anything else most likely never will.