[FADCA] Quick switch solution?

[Chuck Hast]

Folks,
I have not been on here much, mostly because I am never home...
Indeed at this moment I am in Kalama, WA doing a job.

I bought a Lenovo S10 netbook the other day, after playing with it a bit and
figuring out what was hardware idiosyncrasies and OS idiosyncrasies, I pulled
the HD out and stashed it away as I got tired of XP home real fast... I had a
500G HD which was looking for a home, I put it in the machine and loaded
Ubuntu 9.04 on it. That was the best thing i could have done, gave this little
netbook some real legs...

I have been setting here thinking that these little slabs (you close the lid
and that is what it looks like a small black slab) could be pressed
into excellent
switch service. I am going to see if I can set up a switch on this one and at
least get back on the network when I am traveling.  Of course the serial ports
will need to be USB ports, but I think that a lot of us probably now have USB
serial ports in service so that should no longer be a issue, and indeed if you
need multiple ports that is really the way to go.

As I see it, the way prices have dropped on these little machines it should
not be a real big deal to set up a nice switch and other facilities, given that
the processor is a 1.6Ghz atom, and that is probably a lot more legs than
most of our switches, and W2K access points are probably using on old power
hungry machines. And all of them have been optomized to run Linux, indeed
outside of the USA they are still selling large amounts of Linux Netbooks, the
WinXP on a netbook has been mostly in the USA.

When I put Ubuntu on this little box about the only thing I had a problem with
was the microphone, all I had to do was go into the audio config file and add
a line to correct it, I did not have to download any drivers, or other
sillyness.
It just worked. Oh and I am running Compiz with the 3D desktop on it, People
walk up and watch me rotate it to get to another desktop, and that is when i
hear "let me see you do that again!!". And that is followed with, how did you
get that on windows?? from there you can probably guess the rest of it...

Anyhow has been a lot of fun so far....

-- 
Chuck Hast  -- KP4DJT --
To paraphrase my flight instructor;
"the only dumb question is the one you DID NOT ask resulting in my going
out and having to identify your bits and pieces in the midst of torn
and twisted metal."