yet another computer thread

Colleges and Universities A-Z California Institute of Technology
1

<p>Hello. I am a future victim (class of ’10) trying to decide what to take with me to Caltech next year. I’m currently stuck on this computer issue.</p>

<p>My current computer is a 2-year old Dell desktop. 3.0 GHz P4 w/ HT, 1GB RAM, 80G HD, Ethernet, 802.11 b/g, dual boot XP / Linux. Not the newest machine but it does everything I need it to pretty well. I’m thinking of taking this thing along with me next year, although I think shipping charges could be a little steep. (I live on the east coast, if it matters.)</p>

<p>I’m also thinking of buying a small laptop and taking that along with me. I’m looking at the sleek, sexy thinkpad x22. For ~$300, I could get a used one with the following specs:</p>

<p>640 MB RAM, PC-133
20GB HD
800 MHz Pentium M
Radeon graphics, 8MB
Ethernet & 802.11 a/b/g internal
12.1 inch XGA (1024 x 768)
4 lbs
3-4 hours battery life
rock-solid ThinkPad build
Win2000 Pro and/or Linux</p>

<p>What do you guys think? Is it worth it to haul my old Dell all the way out to California? Is there any point in buying another laptop on top of that?</p>

<p>Any thoughts, insights, ideas, etc. are welcome.</p>

2

<p>I'm in the class of '10, and plan on taking a desktop and laptop out there. For extended use, I much prefer a desktop to a laptop. I would get the laptop, I've found it's helpful to have a computer that's <em>mine</em> to take with me, but I also like having a desktop. That's my plan, I know of my hosts for pre-frosh weekend, one had a desktop and laptop, the other just had a laptop. Maybe see what other people think too- but ultimately it's up to you and how much you like your computers (in my case, way too much).</p>

3

<p>You could sell the desktop and buy a pretty performant laptop.
I'm bringing my HP omnibook xe4100 which is similar tothat $300 laptop you described.</p>

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<p>I personally would hate to use a laptop for extended periods of time, but I wanted something that was portable... the solution? Well, I have a laptop, but I also have a dock with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse plugged in. When I'm at home or in the Dorm I just drop it in the dock and it acts exactly like a desktop, but when I'm on the road I just pull it out of the dock, and bam, it's a laptop. ;-D</p>

5

<p>I have a desktop machine running Ubuntu (1.8 GHz I think) as an image server, and a MacBook Pro (2 GHz) for my portability needs. I use the laptop about 70% of the time, but I'm bringing both with me. </p>

<p>-Oren</p>

6

<br>


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<p>More like a stick of gum. This thing was worth $800 new two years ago, so it wouldn’t really be worth selling today. Come to think of it, my spare calculator is probably worth more…</p>

<p>One more question to current students: What OS should I bring? Is just Linux enough, or is there some software we use that must be run under windows?</p>

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<p>I have been using computer equipment that is given away for free by other people for the past one and a half years at Caltech, and it's worked out pretty well for me. In addition, each House has computer labs with new computers, printers, scanners, etc. of various kinds. So you don't always have to bring your own computer.</p>

<p>Be careful with laptops, because I have many friends whose laptops break very often in mysterious ways (and often they come back from repair, and break again the next day).</p>

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<p>
[quote]
What OS should I bring? Is just Linux enough, or is there some software we use that must be run under windows?

[/quote]

I'm not a current student, but a chem-major prefrosh, so my answer may have limited use to you. </p>

<p>I'm still keeping XP on a partition on my laptop (Thinkpad T60.) I think several of the programs we get are Windows-only. However, all of them probably have Linux alternatives – though not necessarily of a similar quality. I know ChemDraw, which is a pretty standard program for chemistry students, is Windows-only. But there are half a dozen Linux alternatives for it, the best known being XDrawChem. Deciding whether to dual boot or just run in Linux wasn't too difficult for me because XP was already installed on my computer. But if I'd actually have to pay for another copy of XP, I would have gone with just Linux. There are enough Linux users at Caltech that you can probably get along just fine only running in Linux (and at the very least have other people to share your pain with.)</p>

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<p>You could always try running windows programs on linux with wine (free) or commercial programs like Cadega, VMware, and CrossOver Office. Didn't VMware recently put out a free version also?</p>

<p>P.S. For the record, Chemdraw Ultra 7 runs under wine. Not the best, but it is usable.</p>

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<p>chemist:</p>

<p>If you're thinking of buying a new OS or software apps, consider waiting until you arrive at the campus since many of them offer steep educational discounts on software that you won't find elsewhere.</p>

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<p>Actually, Caltech offers a lot of software (such as Microsoft Office and Mathematica) for free. You have to be on campus to download it.</p>

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<p>No, I won't be buying a new OS. Any computer you can buy nowadays almost certainly has some version of windows preinstalled on it. I was wondering whether I should erase windows entirely on my future laptop and just run Linux instead.</p>

<p>Free Mathematica and MS Office? Nice.</p>

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<p>chemist:</p>

<p>Why would you get rid of Windows and replace it with Linux? Windows will do just fine and probably be better for you than Linux (fyi - I use Windows and Unix systems but Windows is better for a desktop IMO).</p>

<p>Free is a good price on those apps!</p>

14

<p>If you have a newer processor with VT support, you can run Windows within Linux using Xen.</p>

15

<p>Linux is for communists, Wine is glitchy, and VMWare is slow (although it is indeed freeware now). Good reasons to run Linux include CS homework (the CS Linux cluster is notoriously slow and poorly run) and server setups. Bad reasons include "it's free" (so is polio) and "sticking it to the Man" (he doesn't care). There's honestly no point in installing Linux and then wasting a lot of time trying to make it work like Windows when you can just keep Windows and waste that time getting drunk instead.</p>

<p>Caltech has some major software available free of charge under site license programs. The important packages are Microsoft Office, Acrobat, Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, and SolidWorks. If you sign up for a Caltech MSDN Academic Alliance account (Microsoft's student developer program), you can also get several versions of Windows: 2000, XP, and Server 2003, as well as Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 and Virtual PC.</p>

<p>The Dabney IT reps have put together a list of useful freeware for Windows at <a href="http://turbine.caltech.edu/wiki/Freeware_for_Windows%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://turbine.caltech.edu/wiki/Freeware_for_Windows&lt;/a> to fill common user requests, which some of you chaps might find helpful.</p>

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<p>SteelPangolin, your opinions on Linux are, quite frankly, bs. "Linux is for communists?" Right, that's why so many large American corporations are running their servers with it. Analogies to polio? Please.
Good reasons to use Linux include: it's virus/trojan/spyware/malware free, it's far easier to install than Windows, it's entirely stable, new programs can be easily and freely installed, it's far more customizable than anything else.</p>

<p>P.S. A good deal (if not a majority) of the Windows software on that list if free/open source/communist, just like Linux itself.</p>

17

<p>Oh boy, this again. It appears that I inadvertently started another Linux v. Windows thread. Good thing this isn't a serious computer forum.</p>

<p>To settle this, let me say that I found a good deal on a used laptop and decided to take it. I bargained down the price by letting the guy who sold it keep his copy of XP.</p>

<p>I plan on putting Linux on this thing. It's a thinkpad, so Linux should be easy to get running. Except for the part where I install the OS from a boot CD without an optical drive... That'll be fun.</p>

<p>For those wondering, I am putting Xubuntu on my “new” lappy. This is a close branch of the hugely popular Ubuntu distro, but it uses the lightweight Xfce window manager rather than Ubuntu's bulkier Gnome.</p>

<p>In response to SteelPangolin's comments:</p>

<br>


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<p>I have some experience with this, so I don't expect it to be too bad. I did bootstrap gentoo, after all. A 3-day process...</p>

<br>


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<p>Free XP? Glad I didn't pay for a useless copy, then. Thanks for the information.</p>

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<p>Gentoo installs are fun, aren't they chemist? ;-) Good memories.
If you haven't tried it already, *buntu takes less clicks to install than a Windows program.</p>

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<p>i'm planning on taking a laptop, a desktop, and a server to caltech</p>

<p>laptop dual boots win xp pro and kubuntu (i don't care much for gnome)</p>

<p>desktop has win xp pro x64 and i'm considering putting kubuntu on it as well....</p>

<p>my 2 cents on the linux vs windows thing...</p>

<p>it doesn't really matter.....both work great and there's really no reason to spend time learning linux if you're already good with windows (and vice versa). i personally use windows more than linux because its just easier to find the programs i need in windows. while there are certain advantages to using a linux server, i haven't had any problems with my windows server and i find it easy to manage. the learning curve for linux is definately a lot steeper than windows....</p>

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<p>I’d say that I actually know Linux better than windows. Not saying much, but I’ll stick to linux. I just don’t trust Micro$oft.</p>

<p>Why do you need a server? The entire campus is 3 blocks. If you need a big file, you could just walk over to your desktop…</p>

<p>Now for short a story of how I tried installing linux on my laptop. If you’re up for a laugh, read on. Otherwise just skip the rest of this post.</p>

<p>First of all, the x-series is comprised of very small, lightweight notebooks. To save weight, IBM decided not to waste space on an internal optical drive and made it external via USB.</p>

<p>Now, being a primarily a linux user, I decided not to waste money on a copy of windows and got an x22 with a blank hard drive. I also figured I’d never need a CD drive because any CDs could be ripped and mounted from the HD (especially with the 60GB one that came with this particular computer), so I didn’t bother buying one of those. The dock doesn’t add much besides a CD and floppy drive so I decided not to buy one of those either. And floppy drives are just outdated. So I ended up buying just the computer and charger.</p>

<p>Now came the time to install linux on this thing. No problem, I just get the install CD and…um…nuts.</p>

<p>Okay, most computers can be booted from floppy drives. I make a boot floppy and…oh, right. Didn’t get one of those drives, did I?</p>

<p>Not to worry, IBM’s CD and floppy drives are USB, so a flash drive should work equally well. I make a bootable USB drive with the DSL distro, put it in, enable USB boot in the BIOS, and…nothing. I found out after a while that only IBM-brand CD and floppy drives are bootable. Nothing else. Greedy mofos.</p>

<p>There’s also a PCMCIA and CF slot, but I soon discover that these aren’t bootable either.</p>

<p>Okay, there’s one more thing I can think of: a network boot. This oughta work on anything even remotely modern. I burn Knoppix 5.0.1 to a CD, boot up my desktop, and set up the network boot. My laptop gets to the udev part and crashes. Repeatedly.</p>

<p>I google it and it seems Knoppix 5 has this udev problem. Not to worry, I still have a 4.0.2 image. I erase my CD-RW again and burn v4.0.2. Even worse.</p>

<p>Sooooo. I have a laptop with no operating system, no form of USB drive bootability, no floppy drive, no CD or PCMCIA boot possibilities, and for some reason network boot always fails.</p>

<p>But wait, IBM specifically planned for this! The x22 comes with a recovery partition that will save me. I boot and press F11, and…no OS found. Apparently the previous owner didn’t bother transferring that partition when he upgraded to the new hard drive.</p>

<p>AAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!11!1!oneOne</p>

<p>Next stop: compusa to get a 44-to-40 pin converter so I can take the HD out of the laptop, put it in the desktop, and install linux through that. My aunt’s away with the car, so I gotta go there on foot. It’s only a mile and 90*F outside…I hate my life.</p>

<p>I guess that wasn't so sort. Oh, well. If I survive the grueling expedition I'll post back here on how the rest of the installation goes.</p>