Starport: Shai Dorsai!
Last night I dragged Dorsai, the erstwhile recording box, into the office from the studio bedroom, and pulled out the Delta 1010 soundcard, which will go on the new recording box when I can afford one. It's a very quiet 1.8GHz AMD64 machine. This morning I downloaded the installers for Debian Lenny RC1, and started the install. It's amazing how quickly you can install Debian over gigabit ethernet from a local mirror, and Lenny has an impressively fast boot (hands off, with default timeouts in the bios and grub, it's 70 seconds from power-on to gdm login).
I still need to finish configuring it and installing all the software I usually use, but it should be a vast improvement.
It's also worth noting that the new kernel has, for the first time that I can recall, properly configured sound on the ancient Thinkpad I've been using in the living room.
The final steps in decommissioning Harmony, the old office workstation, will be moving the mirror disk back to Nova (the fileserver), and the Delta 66 soundcard to Dorsai. Sometime this week, hopefully. May make Harmony the interim recording box.
In other computer-related news, splitting a half-hour concert up into songs takes about two hours of work. A faster machine should cut that a little by speeding up things like import, export, and normalization. That's the hope, anyway.
The next major system-administration projects are fixing the wireless networking infrastructure (which hopefully will make printing work from laptops) and (finally!) getting rid of my old DSL line. The latter has been taking a long time because I'm using it for the mail server; I'll have to move mail to an ISP, which scares the heck out of me. It's long past time to do it, though.