indoor fun
By anders pearson 14 Jun 2004
the weather in new york was so beautiful this weekend that i really should be punished for not taking advantage of it.
my excuse is that i had a new toy to play with.
my primary machine at home has been quite flakey for a long time. hardware issues. it’s also big and loud. so a few weeks ago i broke down and ordered a new system. it’s a Shuttle SN41G2 based system. smaller than a breadbox, quiet, reasonably powerful. i ordered it from Los Alamos Computers, who ship it with Debian GNU/Linux pre-installed.
of course, once i’d spent a few hours failing to get mplayer working on Debian, i decided to wipe it and install Gentoo instead, which is the only linux distro that i’ve ever actually managed to get mplayer and all the video codecs properly installed on.
installing gentoo involves a lot of waiting for things to compile though, so i watched a few movies while it chugged away:
- Bend it Like Beckham
- Wild at Heart (when it, or any other David Lynch movie is on TV, i can’t not watch it)
- One Hour Photo
- Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (i was particularly excited to stumble across this on PBS since i’m almost done reading his The Hero With A Thousand Faces)
now i have a brand new, fast, stable machine running with a fancy 2.6 kernel, every bit of hardware on it working nicely, and mplayer installed.