Well the first post of the new year! Hope everyone had a great Christmas/New Year.

When I was out in Florida over Christmas, I bought myself an Acer Aspire One netbook. Basically this little thing has very similar specifications to my Mac Mini which has recently had lots of problems….problems that would be very expensive to fix.

Anyway, I decided I would have a go at getting OS X Leopard running on the Aspire One. I had read that it was possible however without wireless and in some cases sound. Plus I would have to sacrifice the use of the SD expansion port and other media ports. That’s not really something that bothers me though as I use my main computer for anything relating to cameras.

So I installed OS X using Kalyway’s great distro (also I may note that I do own a separate OS X license for this computer) and got everything working except wireless. I found that the Atheros based wireless card in the Aspire wasn’t supported by OS X. So I purchased a broadcom based dell card from eBay for £12 inc P&P. Once that arrived, I fitted it and it worked first time. At the same time I took the opportunity to replace the 512MB RAM module with a 1GB module, taking the system memory up to 1.5GB’s

Overall I’m very happy with the result. I got a great portable laptop / server running the best operating system around for just $349 USD in Walmart!

Unfortunately I cant post any snaps up at the moment as I’m in the middle of moving from Flickr to my own gallery, however will update you once I do have a bunch of images to show off!

Well this posts a little later than planned. I’ve been wanting to update the site, however wanted to get the new release of wordpress up and running first. Well, its now up and I’m loving it.

I thought there would be some big compatibility problems what with all the changes made in 2.5 however it worked flawlessly! Why the new skin you ask? Why Not! I answer

Ok, so last month. I had a lot going on with college, meaning I didn’t have much time to work on anything. Despite this I managed to get the front-end of the webhostbutler.com script completed, and as for the backend I’ve decided to keep it simple and have a very basic backend.

I’ve also started work on the other project (home server). I’ve got big plans for this one.

Finally, I finished building/configuring my home server, its now running Fedora Linux ( core 8 ) and has a bunch of SATA drives slotted in everywhere I could fit them :p The only thing I’m disappointed about is the RAM. Its the hottest part of the entire system, and actually hurts to touch. Because of this its causing the entire room to become a sauna!

Theres not much I can do to fix this other than buy RAM fans (Which are very noisy due to their small form factor). I may try taking 2 of the 4 1gb sticks out to see if that helps. The CPU (Intel c2d 2.66Ghz) is pretty cold and is running on a stock Intel fan (I found this to be quieter and more effective than an Alaska fan purchased from eBuyer). The hard drives are warm to touch, but don’t give off huge amounts of heat like the RAM. The only other warm(ish) component is what looks to be a northbridge with a bronze heatsink built into the motherboard.

So far I’ve got Apache, PHP, MySQL setup for web development, plus SAMBA so I can access the server as if it was a folder on my own computer, I’m using this to have my itunes library stored on the server, which will free up a good 10GB of space on both my laptop and desktop computers. Its also acting as a media storage for any films / tv programs I’ve got.

I also purchased a usb freeview card and it can record TV directly to the server, which can then be watched from any computer/device connected to our home network! I think an upgrade to a 802.11n router will be needed soon. Our netgear 54g is on its way out at the moment. We get through routers like a fat man gets through mars bars! This time I may spend a bit extra and get a faster router and gradually upgrade the network. Especially if Virgin is going to be getting their customers broadband speeds upto 100mbps by years end! No point paying for 100mbps if your internal network is 54mbps

Anyway, this month I hope to get webhostbutler online, and continue work on the home server site. I dont expect to have this ready to launch for a good 2-3 months yet as I want this to be a well thought out project.

Thats about it for now I think!