CV of Justin Lang

Awhile ago, I wanted to start a ne project called Live Free.  Basically, I wanted to see about running a computer completely free.  Meaning, open source, and free software.  I want to see if some one can truely run a basic computer with out any cost otehr then that of a low end computer.

Well, this project is on hold at the moment. The computer that I was planning on using has been given a new home.  I hope that she likes her new owner and lives the rest of her life running cool and happy.  I wish her well and will miss her.

So with out a computer to use, I can’t procede with this project right now.  But I have been doing some thinking about how to start it back up later. Maybe use parallels on my new mac to try it there!  That way it’s all on one computer!!!  I’ll keep you posted.

So I have been doing alot of thinking lately about my road map for upgrading my macs and where I want to go in the future.  I think I have narrowsed down the main computer to a Mac Pro.  It is expandable, FAST and SEXY!  But Renee is correct, what if I am traveling and need to do something?  I think it is at that point that I would include a MacBook Air into the system.  It would be able to sync up with the Mac Pro when I get back.  Plus it doesn’t need to be super powerful as that is what the Mac Pro is for.

But one thing that has come to lite is the fact that I would need wireless broadband access at times.  Now the MacBook Air does have a USB connection and there are USB broadband cards, but thinking more about it… I almost always stay in courtyard marriotts, which have free wireless broadband!  If they only have a wired connection, then plus in the airport express that I have and I have my wireless base station up and running.  I think this is a viable road map, what do you think?

I have been looking for a new ecommerce system to try a new venture.  I have found magento!.  It is open source, which i love. It’s ran by php and mysql.  But most of all, I love the inegration and updating system.  It seems easy to use, I just have to do some more reading on it to figure it out.  Now I just need to find something to sell!

Yesterday, I kicked off the Live Free experiment by going over the linux OS distro that I planned on using.  Well, after reading some more about Ubuntu, I found out that they really don’t offer a distro for the PowerPC architecture.  What a bumber!  So I had to go back to square one.  Did a little more research on linux.org and found a distro from YellowDog Linux that will work.  They actually geared thier distro to the PowerPC chip.  So, let’s start again, I plan on using YellowDog Linux as the OS for the project! ;)

With prices on EVERYTHING going well beyond affordable, I have been thinking lately about how to save money and ways to spend less.  So I came up with an idea.  Can you truly live free on a computer.  What I mean is, can you live your daily life on a PC with an entire system that is either Open Source or freeware software?

The first problem of course is obtaining a computer for free.  Of course this is a little bit of a problem, but at the moment, we’ll over look that.  In this experiment, I am going to use a 12″ PowerPC Mac Powerbook.  I already have it and don’t use it so it makes a perfect candidate for this experiment.

We are going to start off with the Operating System.  All commercial operating systems cost money.  Of course you get the latest version when you buy a new computer, but that license cost is included in the price of the computer.  Then after a while, a new version of the OS comes out and you have to pay more money for that upgrade.  Hence the problem, we are spending money to upgrade to the latest and greatest.  That just won’t work!

So we are going to look at Open Source Operating Systems.  The best open Source OS out there is of course Linux.  Mac OSX is based on a flavor of linux so we know we have to be looking at something worth while if apple uses it!  There are many, MANY flavors of Linux out there.  After doing a little bit of searching on linux.org, I found a distrbution that will work on a PowerPC mac, Ubuntu.

While there are many different versions of Ubuntu, we are going to focus on switching from a main stream OS to an Oen Source OS for the masses.  Meaning, any one that wants to “live free” can do this.  So rather then looking at using a server based distro, we are going to look at a desktop or end user ditro called Ubuntu Desktop Edition. This should be a good replacement for almost any main stream OS out there.  So take a look and see if this is something you might liek to try.  In the next couple of weeks, I’ll review how the installation went and first thoughts on the begining of Living Free!