Moving a Computer

About a week and a half ago I rearranged my bedroom, and it created more space at the foot of the bed, which is now in one corner of the room. I have a rolling computer desk about four feet wide and a 19" CRT monitor. I hadn't been using either and the desk was cluttered up with all sorts of junk.

I went to Frys on Monday hoping to pick up some super cheap stuff to resurrect one of the older desktop boxes, but didn't see stuff as cheap as I'd hoped and decided against getting components. Instead I got to thinking about moving Caristiona, my older machine, into the bedroom. So I got a new trackball for Sileas, a card reader that can read SD cards and Compact Flash along with other types, and a network cable coupler. I knew I had two fifty-foot cables around and while it would have been better if one were a 25-footer, I didn't want to buy another cable.

This morning I began cleaning junk out of the rolling desk, then I got it moved into the bedroom. Next I had to figure out which wires went to which set of speakers and get the speakers separated from the tangle of wires that's proliferated over time. I also took out the KVM switch because I'll only have one computer in the main area which is usually used as a dining area. I also needed to find different outlets for some stuff because I wanted to take one of the uninterupptable power supplies to plug Caristiona and components in. In the course of all that I spotted several wires for stuff I'd once had but wasn't using any more. There were things like USB cables, wires to power transformers that weren't being used. In short, a mess, but now it's a little simpler.

Eventually I got all the necessary stuff into the bedroom and hooked up except for the network cable. The computer worked, although I had to reset the date and time. Then I ran the cable, which included taping it down where it crossed the bedroom entrance and the entrance to the bathroom. The network setup didn't work right away. I had to unplug the router and plug it back in, but once I did that, Caristiona connected to the intertoobs.

My next project is to try and get a version of Linux on my old IBM ThinkPad 1400 from 1998. It still runs although the fan is noisy and it needs to be plugged in to AC to run. But it does run, so perhaps I can find uses for it if I can get stuff set up with Linux. I've learned I need to find a distro which doesn't use something called "cmov" which is not on the ThinkPad's CPU. I'm thinking I might be able to use it to look at photos at Faerieworlds next year.