Blue Gene Baby

The Age

Thursday May 1, 2008

Charles Wright

You can make big savings with the right stuff, writes Charles Wright.

THESE are momentous times in the Bleeding Edge cave. We have discovered somewhere within our emotional DNA - after decades of doubting its existence - a frugal gene.

There couldn't be a better time for the emergence of this 'til now dormant phenomenon, given those dramatic increases in the prices of wheat, rice, vegetables, meat, milk, electricity, petrol etc., which, of course, necessitate rises in interest rates to control inflation by stimulating further increases in the prices of wheat, etc. We can't help but wonder if our economic managers have been taking lessons from Robert Mugabe.

Unfortunately, not having been invited to outline our economic rescue plan to the 2020 celebrity summit, the rest of the nation is going to have to fend for itself. Only you, dear readers, will avoid the soup kitchen and the food queue with the Bleeding Edge frugal gene maintenance plan.

Some of you may have taken our advice to trade your expensive cars for a motor scooter. In 18 months we've saved hundreds of dollars on fuel, maintenance, parking and tolls since we sold the Edgemobile, which had developed an expensive infatuation with the local garage proprietor.

We've been using some of the time we've rescued from traffic jams and searching for parking places learning Linux - an essential plank in our strategy for providing readers with sufficient extra cash to buy the occasional loaf of bread to share with their starving neighbours rather than contributing vast sums to Microsoft, sundry software millionaires and the hardware manufacturers feeding Windows' insatiable demands. For that matter, we can't go on contributing to Apple's profits, which touched $US1.05 billion in the most recent quarter.

Readers may recall that about a year ago we made our first significant investment in Linux after experimenting with SuSE and Ubuntu, with an Australian Dragon media centre. Assembled by Mike Williams, at Torquay-based Better Access (better-access.com), it uses the free Myth TV-Knoppix "portmanteau", Knoppmyth.

Having the Dragon in the lounge has shown us the real joy of Linux. It has handled all our television viewing and recording in HD or standard definition, and all the DVDs and CDs and digital image storage and viewing. It never crashes and it's so little fuss that we almost overlooked its contribution to our new frugality. We've since added a permanent Ubuntu box, on which we run a growing number of free applications.

The experience has convinced us that failing to come to terms with Linux and open source systems is a financial extravagance that we cannot afford if we are to avoid a miserable 2020, or possibly even 2010.

Compare our experience with that of the average Windows Vista user. We bought the top-of-the-line model at the time: an Intel Core2Duo D6320 CPU, dual HD TV cards, 500GB SATA hard drive, digital sound card, DVD drive etc in a Silverstone LC17 case, which, with the Dutch-designed Nexus NX-4090 400-watt power supply, was virtually inaudible.

The price has dropped by about $350 to $1649 in roughly a year. We could have its basic functionality - the ability to record two HD channels simultaneously - in the Better Access Bunyip for $999. We'd recommend adding another $50 or so for a 320 GB hard drive, but even then you'd be well ahead of the hardware costs for a PC capable of running the Windows Vista media centre editions, which add another $319.95 for the Ultimate version, or $259.95 for Home Premium. They offer fewer features and more restrictions on the use of digital media.

Among numerous advantages, Knoppmyth ad-skipping is more useful, there's a free electronic program guide and you can control everything via the Web remotely. It slots into a Windows network, using the Samba networking protocol originally developed by an Australian programmer, Andrew Tridgell.

There's more information at mysettopbox.tv, including the details to build your own box. But for most, pre-assembly is a better alternative, in our opinion.

Knoppmyth is essentially a collection of scripts that automate set up of the MythTV home theatre package and additional utilities, running on the Knoppix distribution of Debian. Mike Williams has contributed to those scripts and written others for local variations. All are publicly available. Linux may be unfamiliar territory for the average Windows user but all the answers are out there on the web.

A good start might be the latest release of Ubuntu, version 8.04 dubbed "Hardy Heron", due this week. Aside from significant enhancements and fixes, it includes "Wubi", the Windows-Based Ubuntu Installer, which allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu as just another Windows application. Instead of burning a live CD, and modifying hard drive partitions, it just adds an option to boot into Ubuntu. Also due this week is the new version of the Asus Eee PC, the Eee 900, which offers a bigger screen, and a cheap, direct route to Linux. We'll look at both shortly.

© 2008 The Age

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