“The computer won’t start.” My wife announced from the other room. My wife and kids share an older athlon 2300+ based eMachine for day-to-day computing. There are few things I dread more than at-home tech support issues, the customers can get so cranky and it’s hard to get them off the line in three minutes. But I knew better than to deprive Mrs. Jackson of her email or my youngest daughter of her Reader Rabbit (running under wine, BTW)
I had swapped out the hard drive recently with one I had on the self and taken the opportunity to install a fresh copy of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I waited a day or so, thinking my shelf spare had died as well and I would need to go shopping, but when I finally took a closer look, I was getting no BIOS messages on the screen. Great, it’s really dead. Knowing the natives where getting restless, and would not be likely to standby patiently while I played musical parts so I pulled an old, retired server I had from the basement pile. It’s a dual CPU, PIII 550Mhz Tyan Tiger 133 with a Matrox G400.

I knew the hard drive in the server was bad, so I plugged in the 80gig from the wife’s desktop machine just to make sure the box would fire up, and lo and behold – It booted! I scrambled to plug in keyboard, mouse and network cable just in time for Gutsy to quiz me about what resolution I wanted to use on the Matrox card and minutes later my wife is booting me off to do her email (I think she needs a 12 step program for email…)

Think about it… The monitor, keyboard, mouse and hard drive are the same, everything else, mother board, CPU (two CPUs!), video card, network card, amount of memory, and sound card are all different, most of it older hardware and it just worked. No reinstall, no driver hunting, no phone call to the OS vendor to prove I’m not a software pirate, no nothing!

Thank you, Ubuntu!