The journey from there to here
Published on March 23, 2007 By Gideon MacLeish In Misc

It's been 2 1/2 years since we've had the Internet out of our home. The last few months have been a matter of just getting things setup since, as an employee of the ISP, I get my Internet at a substantial discount.

The last time someone had come out to set up my Internet, they claimed they couldn't get a signal. And since they never made a ticket, I couldn't look in our billing software to see why they didn't install. After all, I know we're in a prime location; the tower is less than 1000 feet from our front door, with a mostly clear shot (some foliage, but a this tower frequency will penetrate foliage).

So we finally got our guys on the stick and got setup. That "crappy" signal has 0% error rate and 1.5-2.5 mbps speeds. Not SOHO speeds, mind you, but we don't have the frequency in our small town for that kind of connection. More than ample speeds, to be sure.

SO now we're going to set up a crazy cool home network and hit the Internet full force. Like I NEED to spend more time on the 'net...lol!


Comments
on Mar 23, 2007
Cool. How's Ubuntu working out for you?
on Mar 23, 2007
Good so far. I still have the computer in the classroom, going to bring it home now that I have the Internet at home.
on Mar 23, 2007
Congrats and enjoy the hi speed net.
on Mar 23, 2007
Oh, I haven't used anything BUT high speed for years. It's just a matter of having the Internet at home again.

We have VERY limited options: dialup (yech), DSL (SBC= not an option), wireless and clearwire. I'm very much of the belief that if I work for a company, I use that company's services. Especially when that company's services come with such a sweet discount.
on Mar 23, 2007

Good so far. I still have the computer in the classroom, going to bring it home now that I have the Internet at home.



Cool. Since I've had some time to kill sitting around with this back injury I've been playing around with some of the newer releases of various distros. I'm currently running OpenSuse 10.2 and have to say that while it seems a bit bloated (as does Ubuntu to me), personal opinion, I'm actually liking Suse so far. They've definitely improved since the disaster called 10.1.

Of course it's a simple matter to slim down any distro by just removing everything you don't need, which is what I'm going to do with this Suse release.

If you have some time to kill you should check it out. While it shows a 5 CD download (or 1 DVD), you actually only need the first 3 CDs for an initial default install.
on Mar 23, 2007
Doesn't Suse cost?

I may look at it, but I'm not a huge Novell fan. But it's good to know several different operating systems, IMEABO
on Mar 24, 2007
There is a commercial version of Suse that does indeed cost money but, because of the GPL requirements they have to offer it for free as well. The only difference between a commercial distro and a free one is that the commercial one is allowed to include propriatary/non-GPL applications or codecs. The free versions are identical except they lack those non-free applications/codecs (which you can install yourself just as you did with Ubuntu - multimedia codecs and the like). Also, with the commercial versions you're basically paying for the support, not the software itself (which is allowed under the GPL).

OpenSuse is the free version of Suse and it tends to have newer applications as it's something of the development version much like Fedora is for Redhat.

I
on Mar 24, 2007

Like I NEED to spend more time on the 'net...lol!

No, but your children do.