Computer Stuff

My Computer Stuff

Since I'm going to be a Computer Science major, no home page is complete without me babbling about my computers. This is mainly for my own pleasure :).
I also have a table listing all my stuff.

stella | Poseidon | Hades | Athena | Echo | Demeter | Apollo | Hermes | Aphrodite | Misc.

stella stella is my main computer. She (stella is a girl's name) is a Dell Dimension 8200. I bought it the fall of 2001. Looking back on it now, I never would've bought a Dell. Instead I would've made my own. This would've been more fun and I'd get to know the insides of a computer even more.
stella has a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, 512 MB of RDRAM (:\), 2 7200 RPM 80 GB IDE hard drives that are basically filled, a 64 MB DDR nVidia Geforce 3 video card, a 32 MB nVidia TNT2 video card, a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, a 16x DVD-ROM drive, a 48x24x48x CD-RW drive, and some Harmon Kardon "surround" speakers.
I was very interested in doing dual head (having 2 monitors hooked up to one computer to basically double your desktop size) after a friend of mine decided to do it. We both bought the same monitor and basically the same video card. So my 2 monitors are a Dell M991 and a Hitachi CM721F. They are both 19 inches and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. The Dell monitor is very brigth and text is very crisp. It is a standard CRT however, os it is slightly curved. The Hitcahi is a flat CRT but it doesn't seem to be truely flat. The glass is deffinately flat but the display seems to be rounded some. The Hitachi is slightly more accurate with colors however there is a small ghosting effect around text and the mouse cursor. The casual user might not even notice this, but I do, but I quickly got over it and got used to it. Both monitors have a resolution of 1600x1200 so combined my resolution is 3200x1200. I bought an NEC MultiSync LCD1760NXBK-1 LCD monitor. It's 17", has a 16 ms response time (which is excellent), and is very bright. There is no noticeable ghosting at all. Text is very crisp and stuff.
In terms of operating systems on stella, I now dual boot between Gentoo Linux and Windows XP Professional. Previously I had Red Hat Linux 9.0 and Mandrake 9.1 Beta and Mandrake 8.2 before that. Gentoo works like a charm. Every time I've used Linux on stella the sound has gotten better. The first time was in Mandrake and the sound was terrible. It was very flat and I just gave up cuz I didn't think I'd be using Linux that much (back then I wasn't). Then in Red Hat the sound was improved to a point where it was acceptable by my standards. Then the sound in Gentoo is even better. I think it's the sound module that has been loaded each time. I think Gentoo might've detected the correct one for the first time :).

Poseidon Poseidon is my laptop. He is an IBM Thinkpad R32. I bought him in June of 2003 with some of my graduation money.
He has a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 Mobile processor, 512 MB DDR RAM (upgraded from 256), a 30 GB hard drive, a 16 MB ATi Radeon 8500 Mobility video card, and a DVD-ROM drive. I also got a wireless card so I can get online at places without having to be plugged in to anytihng. I also have an extra battery that goes in the UltraBay 2000 slot.
Poseidon dual boots Windows XP and Gentoo Linux. Like Red Hat before it, this was my original test bed for Gentoo. The first attempt at installing Gentoo failed because I had messed up the partitions, but the second time worked. Just about all my problems in Red Hat were solved when installing Gentoo, because Gentoo actually works. I don't have to worry about dependencies and all that stuff. This machine was also my original test bed for Red Hat 9.0 and honestly, looking back on it now, I shouldn't have used a laptop as a test bed. They are often more difficult to set up because of proprietary and legacy hardware. I was pretty fortunate that most of my hardware was detected.
Poseidon originally dualbooted Windows XP and Gentoo Linux, but I got tired of being having Windows on there and never using it, so in the fall of 2004 I decided to just remove the Windows partition. There was some thought about what to put in its place -- should I install NetBSD? I tried but my NetBSD skills weren't that great and I wasn't very patient and I gave up too soon to really get it working properly. In the end I made the extra space my /home partition in Linux.
Poseidon overheats. I don't know if it is bad configuration on my part (which could definitely be possible), or bad hardware (which could also be possible), but sometimes the fan doesn't come on, and Poseidon's CPU gets up to >72C which is Not A Good Thing.

Hades Hades is my little server. He acts as my web server and a good place to ssh to. He is basically a mixture of parts that I've collected from various people, places, and machines. The motherboard, processor, and memory came from my friend Nils, one hard drive, the CD-ROM drive and floppy drive from Echo, another hard drive from an old computer I salvaged, and the video card and Ethernet card are from our library.
Hades has a 266 MHz Pentium II, an Intel AL440LX Motherboard, 192 MB of SDRAM, a 1.0 GB hard drive, a 4x CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, an old video card (I can't remember what kind; I don't use it too often), and a 3com 100 Mbit Ethernet card. He has a Raidmax case that was on sale on Newegg and he looks really nice. If only the CD-ROM drive worked.
Hades now runs Gentoo, so now all 3 of my main boxes have Gentoo on them. I did a stage 1 install on Hades, and that took about 24 hours. The result, though, was a completely customized kernel and everything. It was pretty cool.

Athena Athena is a Dell Optiplex G1 that I was eventually going to be thrown away. So I salvaged her. She has a 400 MHz Celeron, 256 MB of PC100 RAM, a 4 GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and a 100 MB zip drive. It is also equipped with a 100 mbit Ethernet card, a SCSI adapter that is not currently in use, and onboard ATI video and onboard sound.
The main reason I salvaged her was because I was in the mood for a crappy computer to use instead of stella. I was in a "crappy computer" mode, and this is what I found.
Athena runs NetBSD 2.0 and relies on stella or Hades for the pkgsrc distribution.
Echo Echo was our old family computer before we bought a Dell (not stella). I gave it the name Echo right before I kind of killed it.
Echo is a Compaq Presario 9546. I generally just call Echo "The Compaq". For most of it's life, the Compaq had a 100 MHz Pentium Processor, 48 MB EDO RAM, a 1.0 GB hard drive, later on we added a 4.3 GB hard drive, a 33.6K modem, and some other junk. In the past year I had been playing around with the Compaq, replacing parts with extra parts that I could find, and basically trying to make it into a machine that Hades would eventually become. It actually was a working server, but there was something wrong with the power supply so I basically gave up because it wasn't really worth trying to put the Compaq to use since it sucked so much.
What is interesting, however, is that I overclocked the Compaq and installed a new processor. First I overclocked the P100 to 133 MHz and then I got a Pentium MMX 166 and put that in. And that was the end of the Compaq.

Demeter Demeter is a Sun Sparcstation 5 that I got on eBay for $2 (plus $25 shipping :)) It is what I consider to my first real foray into a non-x86 platform (the handhelds don't really cound since they're all embedded). This is a real computer. I mainly bought this so I could say that I own a Sparc. When it arrived, This is also my first computer that is entirely SCSI, which is cool.
The SS5 has a Sparc processor running at 110 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, a 2.1 GB SCSI hard drive, a SCSI CD-ROM drive, an 8-mbit Sbus framebuffer card, onboard sound and Ethernet. Because of the framebuffer card, I could not hook this baby up to any of my monitors, but I wanted to see if I could use the Velo as a serial console, but I was not successful. Eventually, I brought it back to Earlham in June when I came back to work over them summer, and we hooked it up to our Sun monitor here. We determined that it had Solaris 8 on it. I was able to play around in Solaris, but found it just plain weird, and was left with a choice of either Gentoo/sparc or NetBSD/sparc. I surprisingly opted for the latter.
Demeter is now running NetBSD/sparc 1.6.1 quite well.

Apollo Apollo is my Palm Tungsten C. I feel kind of guilty putting it on here because it officially doesn't have a name because there is no place in the PalmOS (that I know of) where you name the device. With all my other computers there is /etc/hostname in Linux, and the network name in Windows (even the Velo has this). But ever since I got the Palm, I knew that it would be called Apollo.
Hermes Hermes is the Philips Velo 500 that I bought from Joe. It is an old Windows CE Handheld PC (H/PC as it was known back then) from around 1997. For those of you that don't know, a H/PC is like a tiny laptop, with a 640x240 display and a small keyboard. He had this when we were in 8th grade together, and I have some very fond memories of it. He had Zork on it and I was really into that at the time, so I played it a lot. Anyways, I bought it from him for $20. I got everything that came with it, except the battery pack and the AC adapter. The Velo uses AA batteries so I stuck 2 Duracells in there and it's still running. I don't expect it to keep running for very much longer. It uses standard NiMH battery packs so I might be able to find some. The AC adapter might be harder to replace since they usually recommend that you use a certified one.
Hermes has a 75 MHz MIPS-based PR31700 RISC processor, 16 MB of RAM, a 28.8Kbps modem, two miniature card slots, an expansion port, a backlit screen, touch sensitive display, built-in microphone and speaker, a high speed RS-232 serial port, a standard infrared transceiver, and Windows CE 2.0.
I'm still working on getting it set up so I can sync it with my laptop (Poseidon is where I do most of my Palm work because it's the easiest machine I can boot into Windows), but this thing is so old I don't know if XP still supports it. Idealy I'd like to sync if via infrared because my laptop doesn't have a serial port, although it does have a parallel port and the Velo dock comes with a serial > parallel converter. I might actually have better luck syncing this in Linux since this device is so old and it uses a serial port.

Aphrodite Aphrodite is one of my favorite machines. It is an IBM Workpad z50 that runs Windows CE. The z50 was one of the few short-lived Professional Handheld PCs (H/PCs for short). The H/PCs were small, laptop-like computers exept they ran Windows CE. Of course, they had a small processor, some ammounts of RAM, and the OS in ROM. My machine has 48 MB of RAM. This machine has 1 PCMCIA slot and 1 CompactFlash slot, which accepts IBM microdrives.
I bought this machine mainly because I found a website that has instructions on running the hpcmips port of NetBSD on it. The process involves putting NetBSD on a Microdrive or a CompactFlash card since the z50 has no hard drive. Because Windows CE is stored in ROM, NetBSD does not replace it. To boot NetBSD I have to use a special Windows CE bootloader that then loads the NetBSD kernel. I downloaded a precompiled kernel that includes power management, screen blanking on suspend, and other goodies tailored to the z50.
The hpcmips port includes a small X11 server, so I can actually run X on this. This thing has a 640x480 display and supports 65K colors. With a wireless card, this machine can act as a basic laptop. I mainly use this machine to ssh to Hades or stella and then do work from there.

Misc. Networking stuff
When I lived at home we had cable Internet, so we had a router so we could connect multiple PCs. We had an SMC router with a 4 port switch and an integrated print server. This router proved to be very reliable even though some of the advanced features of it were kind of confusing. In my bedroom I routed my PCs even more with a 5 port 100 Mbit Linksys hub.
Earlier this summer I bought a Linksys Wireless Access Point so I could use my laptop from anywhere in the house. After getting it set up it proved to be very cool and pretty reliable. The SSID of the access point is Narcissus, going along with my Greek gods naming system.
Very recently I bought a Linksys router so I can connect multiple computers to one Internet connection in my dorm room using the same IP address. After having to hassle with my Internet connection at Earlham that was constantly getting dropped because of the latest worm and problems with the router I was about ready to give up and return it when I decided to try and plug the router directly into the wall outlet instead of a power strip. This eliminated all the problems that I was having earlier, and now I'm enjoying being able to use multiple computers in my room. I'm actually typing this on my laptop and it's going through my router.
The fact that my 3 main networking devices are all Linksys is somewhat of a coincidence I think. Aesthetically, I prefer Netgear's hubs and switches because they are more square, they're easier to stack, and they're wall mountable (hehe, how cool is that?). However, they've recently redesigned most of their stuff in some silvery, round plastic that I don't like so I've kind of stayed away from them. Plus, the hub is the first Linksys product I got and I was not very disappointed and although the access point wasn't cheap, I've been fairly satisfied with Linksys. I have never had to call technical support (I'm one of those guys that calls tech. support only as a last resort - I can usually fix my problem by reading stuff online), but from what I've heard their technical support isn't that great. So I'm kind of thankful for that.
I also have an 8 port 10 Mbit Netgear hub that I rarely use, mainly because it's 10 Mbit. I also have an old D-Link print server that supposedly only works with NetWare. I've never really tried too hard to set it up.
Peripherals
I have a Zip 250 drive that I rarely use anymore. I got it as a gift from my parents for getting good grades in school in a time when I was struggling. I was very excited to have it at the time but I've barely used it lately. I kind of like hooking it up because I sort of get pleasure out of plugging in many devices at once.
I have a Brother HL-1435 laser printer. It is very new and I have not used it that much but it has been very reliable so far. It is plugged into stella via parallel.

Software I use

Operating systems: I use Gentoo Linux on stella, Hades, and Poseidon, FreeBSD on Echo, NetBSD on Aphrodite and Demeter. I also have Windows XP on stella.
Web Browser: I use Mozilla Firefox. It is a free, open source web browser that supports tab browsing, popup blocking, and other advanced features
Mail client: I use mutt. See the Documents page for my .muttrc if you're interested.
Terminals: Eterm, aterm, rxvt
Misc.: GNU/Emacs, irssi, Gaim

stella \| Poseidon \| Hades \| Athena \| Echo \| Demeter \| Apollo \| Hermes \| Aphrodite \| Misc.
stella	stella is my main computer. She (stella is a girl's name) is a Dell Dimension 8200. I bought it the fall of 2001. Looking back on it now, I never would've bought a Dell. Instead I would've made my own. This would've been more fun and I'd get to know the insides of a computer even more. stella has a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, 512 MB of RDRAM (:\), 2 7200 RPM 80 GB IDE hard drives that are basically filled, a 64 MB DDR nVidia Geforce 3 video card, a 32 MB nVidia TNT2 video card, a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, a 16x DVD-ROM drive, a 48x24x48x CD-RW drive, and some Harmon Kardon "surround" speakers. I was very interested in doing dual head (having 2 monitors hooked up to one computer to basically double your desktop size) after a friend of mine decided to do it. We both bought the same monitor and basically the same video card. So my 2 monitors are a Dell M991 and a Hitachi CM721F. They are both 19 inches and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. The Dell monitor is very brigth and text is very crisp. It is a standard CRT however, os it is slightly curved. The Hitcahi is a flat CRT but it doesn't seem to be truely flat. The glass is deffinately flat but the display seems to be rounded some. The Hitachi is slightly more accurate with colors however there is a small ghosting effect around text and the mouse cursor. The casual user might not even notice this, but I do, but I quickly got over it and got used to it. Both monitors have a resolution of 1600x1200 so combined my resolution is 3200x1200. I bought an NEC MultiSync LCD1760NXBK-1 LCD monitor. It's 17", has a 16 ms response time (which is excellent), and is very bright. There is no noticeable ghosting at all. Text is very crisp and stuff. In terms of operating systems on stella, I now dual boot between Gentoo Linux and Windows XP Professional. Previously I had Red Hat Linux 9.0 and Mandrake 9.1 Beta and Mandrake 8.2 before that. Gentoo works like a charm. Every time I've used Linux on stella the sound has gotten better. The first time was in Mandrake and the sound was terrible. It was very flat and I just gave up cuz I didn't think I'd be using Linux that much (back then I wasn't). Then in Red Hat the sound was improved to a point where it was acceptable by my standards. Then the sound in Gentoo is even better. I think it's the sound module that has been loaded each time. I think Gentoo might've detected the correct one for the first time :).
Poseidon	Poseidon is my laptop. He is an IBM Thinkpad R32. I bought him in June of 2003 with some of my graduation money. He has a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 Mobile processor, 512 MB DDR RAM (upgraded from 256), a 30 GB hard drive, a 16 MB ATi Radeon 8500 Mobility video card, and a DVD-ROM drive. I also got a wireless card so I can get online at places without having to be plugged in to anytihng. I also have an extra battery that goes in the UltraBay 2000 slot. Poseidon dual boots Windows XP and Gentoo Linux. Like Red Hat before it, this was my original test bed for Gentoo. The first attempt at installing Gentoo failed because I had messed up the partitions, but the second time worked. Just about all my problems in Red Hat were solved when installing Gentoo, because Gentoo actually works. I don't have to worry about dependencies and all that stuff. This machine was also my original test bed for Red Hat 9.0 and honestly, looking back on it now, I shouldn't have used a laptop as a test bed. They are often more difficult to set up because of proprietary and legacy hardware. I was pretty fortunate that most of my hardware was detected. Poseidon originally dualbooted Windows XP and Gentoo Linux, but I got tired of being having Windows on there and never using it, so in the fall of 2004 I decided to just remove the Windows partition. There was some thought about what to put in its place -- should I install NetBSD? I tried but my NetBSD skills weren't that great and I wasn't very patient and I gave up too soon to really get it working properly. In the end I made the extra space my /home partition in Linux. Poseidon overheats. I don't know if it is bad configuration on my part (which could definitely be possible), or bad hardware (which could also be possible), but sometimes the fan doesn't come on, and Poseidon's CPU gets up to >72C which is Not A Good Thing.
Hades	Hades is my little server. He acts as my web server and a good place to ssh to. He is basically a mixture of parts that I've collected from various people, places, and machines. The motherboard, processor, and memory came from my friend Nils, one hard drive, the CD-ROM drive and floppy drive from Echo, another hard drive from an old computer I salvaged, and the video card and Ethernet card are from our library. Hades has a 266 MHz Pentium II, an Intel AL440LX Motherboard, 192 MB of SDRAM, a 1.0 GB hard drive, a 4x CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, an old video card (I can't remember what kind; I don't use it too often), and a 3com 100 Mbit Ethernet card. He has a Raidmax case that was on sale on Newegg and he looks really nice. If only the CD-ROM drive worked. Hades now runs Gentoo, so now all 3 of my main boxes have Gentoo on them. I did a stage 1 install on Hades, and that took about 24 hours. The result, though, was a completely customized kernel and everything. It was pretty cool.
Athena	Athena is a Dell Optiplex G1 that I was eventually going to be thrown away. So I salvaged her. She has a 400 MHz Celeron, 256 MB of PC100 RAM, a 4 GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and a 100 MB zip drive. It is also equipped with a 100 mbit Ethernet card, a SCSI adapter that is not currently in use, and onboard ATI video and onboard sound. The main reason I salvaged her was because I was in the mood for a crappy computer to use instead of stella. I was in a "crappy computer" mode, and this is what I found. Athena runs NetBSD 2.0 and relies on stella or Hades for the pkgsrc distribution.
Echo	Echo was our old family computer before we bought a Dell (not stella). I gave it the name Echo right before I kind of killed it. Echo is a Compaq Presario 9546. I generally just call Echo "The Compaq". For most of it's life, the Compaq had a 100 MHz Pentium Processor, 48 MB EDO RAM, a 1.0 GB hard drive, later on we added a 4.3 GB hard drive, a 33.6K modem, and some other junk. In the past year I had been playing around with the Compaq, replacing parts with extra parts that I could find, and basically trying to make it into a machine that Hades would eventually become. It actually was a working server, but there was something wrong with the power supply so I basically gave up because it wasn't really worth trying to put the Compaq to use since it sucked so much. What is interesting, however, is that I overclocked the Compaq and installed a new processor. First I overclocked the P100 to 133 MHz and then I got a Pentium MMX 166 and put that in. And that was the end of the Compaq.
Demeter	Demeter is a Sun Sparcstation 5 that I got on eBay for $2 (plus $25 shipping :)) It is what I consider to my first real foray into a non-x86 platform (the handhelds don't really cound since they're all embedded). This is a real computer. I mainly bought this so I could say that I own a Sparc. When it arrived, This is also my first computer that is entirely SCSI, which is cool. The SS5 has a Sparc processor running at 110 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, a 2.1 GB SCSI hard drive, a SCSI CD-ROM drive, an 8-mbit Sbus framebuffer card, onboard sound and Ethernet. Because of the framebuffer card, I could not hook this baby up to any of my monitors, but I wanted to see if I could use the Velo as a serial console, but I was not successful. Eventually, I brought it back to Earlham in June when I came back to work over them summer, and we hooked it up to our Sun monitor here. We determined that it had Solaris 8 on it. I was able to play around in Solaris, but found it just plain weird, and was left with a choice of either Gentoo/sparc or NetBSD/sparc. I surprisingly opted for the latter. Demeter is now running NetBSD/sparc 1.6.1 quite well.
Apollo	Apollo is my Palm Tungsten C. I feel kind of guilty putting it on here because it officially doesn't have a name because there is no place in the PalmOS (that I know of) where you name the device. With all my other computers there is /etc/hostname in Linux, and the network name in Windows (even the Velo has this). But ever since I got the Palm, I knew that it would be called Apollo.
Hermes	Hermes is the Philips Velo 500 that I bought from Joe. It is an old Windows CE Handheld PC (H/PC as it was known back then) from around 1997. For those of you that don't know, a H/PC is like a tiny laptop, with a 640x240 display and a small keyboard. He had this when we were in 8th grade together, and I have some very fond memories of it. He had Zork on it and I was really into that at the time, so I played it a lot. Anyways, I bought it from him for $20. I got everything that came with it, except the battery pack and the AC adapter. The Velo uses AA batteries so I stuck 2 Duracells in there and it's still running. I don't expect it to keep running for very much longer. It uses standard NiMH battery packs so I might be able to find some. The AC adapter might be harder to replace since they usually recommend that you use a certified one. Hermes has a 75 MHz MIPS-based PR31700 RISC processor, 16 MB of RAM, a 28.8Kbps modem, two miniature card slots, an expansion port, a backlit screen, touch sensitive display, built-in microphone and speaker, a high speed RS-232 serial port, a standard infrared transceiver, and Windows CE 2.0. I'm still working on getting it set up so I can sync it with my laptop (Poseidon is where I do most of my Palm work because it's the easiest machine I can boot into Windows), but this thing is so old I don't know if XP still supports it. Idealy I'd like to sync if via infrared because my laptop doesn't have a serial port, although it does have a parallel port and the Velo dock comes with a serial > parallel converter. I might actually have better luck syncing this in Linux since this device is so old and it uses a serial port.
Aphrodite	Aphrodite is one of my favorite machines. It is an IBM Workpad z50 that runs Windows CE. The z50 was one of the few short-lived Professional Handheld PCs (H/PCs for short). The H/PCs were small, laptop-like computers exept they ran Windows CE. Of course, they had a small processor, some ammounts of RAM, and the OS in ROM. My machine has 48 MB of RAM. This machine has 1 PCMCIA slot and 1 CompactFlash slot, which accepts IBM microdrives. I bought this machine mainly because I found a website that has instructions on running the hpcmips port of NetBSD on it. The process involves putting NetBSD on a Microdrive or a CompactFlash card since the z50 has no hard drive. Because Windows CE is stored in ROM, NetBSD does not replace it. To boot NetBSD I have to use a special Windows CE bootloader that then loads the NetBSD kernel. I downloaded a precompiled kernel that includes power management, screen blanking on suspend, and other goodies tailored to the z50. The hpcmips port includes a small X11 server, so I can actually run X on this. This thing has a 640x480 display and supports 65K colors. With a wireless card, this machine can act as a basic laptop. I mainly use this machine to ssh to Hades or stella and then do work from there.
Misc.	Networking stuff When I lived at home we had cable Internet, so we had a router so we could connect multiple PCs. We had an SMC router with a 4 port switch and an integrated print server. This router proved to be very reliable even though some of the advanced features of it were kind of confusing. In my bedroom I routed my PCs even more with a 5 port 100 Mbit Linksys hub. Earlier this summer I bought a Linksys Wireless Access Point so I could use my laptop from anywhere in the house. After getting it set up it proved to be very cool and pretty reliable. The SSID of the access point is Narcissus, going along with my Greek gods naming system. Very recently I bought a Linksys router so I can connect multiple computers to one Internet connection in my dorm room using the same IP address. After having to hassle with my Internet connection at Earlham that was constantly getting dropped because of the latest worm and problems with the router I was about ready to give up and return it when I decided to try and plug the router directly into the wall outlet instead of a power strip. This eliminated all the problems that I was having earlier, and now I'm enjoying being able to use multiple computers in my room. I'm actually typing this on my laptop and it's going through my router. The fact that my 3 main networking devices are all Linksys is somewhat of a coincidence I think. Aesthetically, I prefer Netgear's hubs and switches because they are more square, they're easier to stack, and they're wall mountable (hehe, how cool is that?). However, they've recently redesigned most of their stuff in some silvery, round plastic that I don't like so I've kind of stayed away from them. Plus, the hub is the first Linksys product I got and I was not very disappointed and although the access point wasn't cheap, I've been fairly satisfied with Linksys. I have never had to call technical support (I'm one of those guys that calls tech. support only as a last resort - I can usually fix my problem by reading stuff online), but from what I've heard their technical support isn't that great. So I'm kind of thankful for that. I also have an 8 port 10 Mbit Netgear hub that I rarely use, mainly because it's 10 Mbit. I also have an old D-Link print server that supposedly only works with NetWare. I've never really tried too hard to set it up. Peripherals I have a Zip 250 drive that I rarely use anymore. I got it as a gift from my parents for getting good grades in school in a time when I was struggling. I was very excited to have it at the time but I've barely used it lately. I kind of like hooking it up because I sort of get pleasure out of plugging in many devices at once. I have a Brother HL-1435 laser printer. It is very new and I have not used it that much but it has been very reliable so far. It is plugged into stella via parallel. Software I use Operating systems: I use Gentoo Linux on stella, Hades, and Poseidon, FreeBSD on Echo, NetBSD on Aphrodite and Demeter. I also have Windows XP on stella. Web Browser: I use Mozilla Firefox. It is a free, open source web browser that supports tab browsing, popup blocking, and other advanced features Mail client: I use mutt. See the Documents page for my .muttrc if you're interested. Terminals: Eterm, aterm, rxvt Misc.: GNU/Emacs, irssi, Gaim