(The title of this post should be read with the same cadence as “Thomas The Tank Engine.”) When my son Kevin got his Falcon Northwest computer he passed on to me his old Gateway computer (which is a nice dual core system). This computer had its hard drive wiped and a new install of OpenSuse 11.2 placed on it. I transferred over the Hauppauge TV card from Sluggo and hooked it up to Sluggo’s monitor and speakers in our kitchen, and suddenly the computer, newly renamed MediumHeadBoy, had taken over for old Slug. The only glitch I had with this computer and SuSE was a problem with the on-board sound system. The Hauppauge TV card has an audio output that needs to be plugged into the line-in jack of the sound card. Alas (I’m starting to sound like Jerry Pournelle from Chaos Manor) being a proprietary type Gateway motherboard, SuSE just didn’t recognize the existence of the line-in jack, and so no TV sound. I solved that problem by scavenging an old Audigy Soundblaster card from the original Alienware version of MonsterMagnet and plugging it into the last remaining PCI slot on the motherboard (after some contortions involving a tightly stretched ribbon cable that stretched from one end of the computer to the other — nice design decision there, Gateway!). So MediumHeadBoy works great, and is 10,000 times faster than Sluggo was.
What of the fate of Sluggo? Well, Sluggo is the web server and POP3 server for our network, and I wanted to keep him/it in that role. So, Sluggo now sits in my closet, no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard — just a power cable and an ethernet cable to connect him to the World Wide Web. Sluggo is now a headless server. His runlevel at boot-up is only 3; no more X for him. I can log on to him using SSH from anywhere, or see him in my network folders using Samba on my network. Hopefully he will live long and prosper in his new role as a dedicated server here at EP Studios.
