The Mandelbear's Musings

OK, I'd call that an unqualified success. Put down a test track using a laptop (Argo) as an X terminal, talking to the recording machine (Harmony) running as a pure server. (Harmony actually had an X login screen showing, but nothing was happening on it so X wasn't stealing cycles.) Clean as a whistle, even though the laptop with its mildly annoying fan was just a foot or so below the guitar mic.

My other home computing accomplishment over the weekend was that I finally figured out what was wrong with my mail server -- people who reply to, e.g., steve at nova.thestarport.org should now get through. The winning trick seems to be adding *.thestarport.org to the relay_domains config variable on the gateway's copy of exim4. Possibly in combination with a wildcard MX record on the internal DNS server -- it's there, I just don't know whether it's necessary. Maybe a mail expert could chime in with an opinion. Unfortunately Debian's favorite mail server doesn't seem to be particularly well-documented.

Fry's doesn't seem to have their $250 Windows boxen on sale today, but they do have $450 laptops. Of course, at that price they're probably junk (my experiences with off-brand laptops have not been happy ones), and it's still $200 more than I was planning to spend. It would probably have trouble running Linux, too -- laptop displays are notoriously weird. The Cygwin X server would mitigate that problem, of course.

... OK, I wasn't looking hard enough. It's on the back page of their Friday flier; twice as fast a CPU as the laptop, and I know it runs Linux. Pretty easy two-stage install: use Xandros to resize the NTFS partition, then blow it away and replace with DeMuDi or Etch. (Sigh! I was thinking of getting a flash recorder with that money...)