Another day, another OS

Today, yet another piece of hardware turned up in the form of an Acer Revo, which we picked up for just £145. It's not a throbbing powerhouse by any means: running just a 1.6GHz Atom, with 1Gb of RAM and a 160Gb HDD; but that's plenty to do what we want - specifically run the perforce server. It's also utterly silent and draws less than 20W: perfect for an always-on machine. That price comes with a couple of catches though: no sensible installed OS, and no optical drive - which has meant spending the afternoon learning enough about Ubuntu to install it from a USB, get SSH running and transfer the Perforce database over from the MiniMac.

"Just a 1.6GHz Atom, with 1Gb of RAM and a 160Gb HDD" I say! When I first learnt to program it was on a ZX81, it had a 3.25Hz (not megahertz, not gigahertz, just plain ol' hertz) processor and 1K of RAM. We, though, had the upgrade allowing a huge 16K of RAM! You did have type gently though, or it'd come lose and crash the thing... The first HDD we had, when I was about 14 or 15, was a 20Mb beast - we couldn't see how we'd ever fill it. How fast things change!