I haven’t been keeping up my blog lately. Lots of other things have been happening. I thought I’d take a moment to update everyone on a few of them.<\/p>\n
I started off the new year with a plan. I had been camping out on Pam’s MacBook Pro for over a year and I decided that it was time that I got my own machine again. I looked at the bank account and like the responsible adult that I am (no snickers from the peanut gallery), I decided that there wasn’t an Apple computer in my near future.<\/p>\n
I have my iPhone and my iPad. I have the use of Pam’s Macbook Pro if I really need a Mac. But for my everyday work horse I needed something less expensive.<\/p>\n
Around that time the Raspberry Pi 3 was announced. I was impressed. Here was a computer with the horsepower of a high end cell phone. I mean that as a compliment. High end cell phones are more powerful in many ways than a lot of low end desktops.<\/p>\n
Then, Pi day came (3\/14\/16, get it? Pi rounds to 3.1416.) and Western Digital, the disk drive manufacturer came out with a special product. It was a 314 GB hard drive for the Raspberry Pi that they were selling for $31.41. When I looked into it I discovered that they had a 1 TB model for around $80 and it came with cables, a power adapter, and a case.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, I bought the Raspberry Pi 3, a new monitor for about $100, and the WD 1 TB Pi Drive. The Raspberry Pi and monitor came in rather quickly. WD backordered the disk drive and I ended up waiting a month for it. But for about three hundred dollars, I had a new computer.<\/p>\n
When it finally came in, I installed the multi-boot software that they suggested for it and chose Fedora 23 ARM for the distribution that I wanted to run. To make a long story short, for technical reasons that I won’t go into right now, the Pi was not up to being used as a developer’s computer. It is fine for a hobby computer or for a student that is just learning to program. It is great to build Internet of Things projects around. It just doesn’t have the guts to be a developer’s main computer.<\/p>\n
I was depressed. I thought I had discovered a cheap way to get my own computer up and running. I moped around for a few days and then I started looking around to see what I could find to solve my problem. I found a local store that had refurbished computers but they weren’t exactly what I needed. Besides, I didn’t have the money to buy what they had in stock.<\/p>\n
Then, in a flash of inspiration I remembered that I had a $100 Amazon gift card that I\u00a0 had forgotten about. I started shopping on Amazon and soon found a refurbished Dell with a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a 500 GB hard drive, and 8 GB of RAM. It wasn’t perfect but it was adequate for a developer’s machine.<\/p>\n
I had to put $40 with the gift card to get it but a week later it arrived. It came with Windows 7 Professional. I am not a Windows fan. I have worked with Windows every day at work for the past twenty years or so, so it isn’t that I don’t know how to use it. I just don’t like it. But that’s a topic for another blog post.<\/p>\n
I do know that Windows is useful on occasions so I went ahead and installed it. Then, I installed Fedora 23 x86_64 on it. I was impressed. The Fedora install program did a wonderful job of shrinking my Windows partition and creating the Linux partitions. Fedora booted up and has run like a dream ever since. It is not a Mac but it is a good solid developers machine. I have been very happy with it.<\/p>\n
I’ll post more on what I am developing with it in another post. This post has gotten longer than I intended and I need to get to bed. I will hint that not only am I developing software with it but I am also writing a book on programming with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I haven’t been keeping up my blog lately. Lots of other things have been happening. I thought I’d take a moment to update everyone on a few of them. I started off the new year with a plan. I had been camping out on Pam’s MacBook Pro for over a year and I decided that … Continue reading “News (and a Few Comments)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[145,112,2,4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":361,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions\/361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}