Scattering MegaSystem to Ubuntu/XP – Part 1

Email stopped coming in.

I dropped the 11+ year tranzoa.com web hoster. What I said to the guys at AZC.com: “You don’t shut off someone’s email without telling them, dictionary spam surge or no. And, you don’t tell them to use gmail. Not on a $33 a month service … in 2008.”

So, poor asuka (aka tranzoa.net) almost worked its aged, 128meg, 200mhz Pentium II heart out hosting tranzoa.com.

gina (aka bran) overflew its 1 gig system disk and floundered its powerhouse, dual Pentium II 250mhz, 512mb trying to process email to the tune of 20k – 30k spams a day. It’s amazing what a 9 year old, $100 Boeing Surplus machine can do in a pinch.

The old ViewSonic 21″ secondary monitor faded to dark.

The replacement box, spring, took a week to find a working motherboard from Fry’s and had a hard disk failure in a month (power outage – maybe not something to even notice except that it failed on some data needed to boot).

To get spring running I managed to toast MegaSystem’s motherboard. This was not well timed.

For perhaps good reasons, perhaps not, spring’s OS is Ubuntu H 64. The new Megasystem XP runs in a VMWare box. That’s the theory. In practice, I have spent a boatload of time moving much of my personal computing operation to spring’s Ubuntu. Browser, email, IM, picture editing and much of the housekeeping stuff built over years.

This would be the fun part of computing if I were a computer person. Remember the verified, 70’s observation: “Normal people expect computers to treat them badly. Computer people demand it.”

I am not even a normal person. Computers exist for me, not the other way around. At 10 years old, I claimed as much while half-stepping arithmetic homework. And, I claimed right.

This has not been the fun part of computing.

Ah, well. I lied. There was one fun part. Since MegaSystem was dead, its 3 gig of RAM fit rather nicely in Scott’s old “tara” box with the Auburn VO stickers and all. So, to keep the status quo, asuka is still running on antiquated hardware. It’s just running on 10x the CPU and 20x the RAM. Makes a difference. Doesn’t take 5 minutes to deliver a web page, for instance.

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