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Hostnames
This page lists all my PC's that owned over the years, I may have forgot about a few though. I give each machine a name inspired by a theme. Some of the machine were repurposed and given new names. This list is mostly chronological.
necropolis
The name is inspired by the tall, black chassis that housed this demon - heavy as a granite tombstone - which embodied The Land of the Dead: when hell is full the dead shall walk the earth.
My first desktop tower that was not cannibalised from spare parts, this Brownsville server main board and P4 core duo kept moving those cycles for many years.
This machine first ran Ubuntu 8.10 through 10.04, and hosted multiple other experimental dual-boots. The last few years was home to Crunchbang Linux [1] running openbox [2], and later a myriad of tiling WM’s… catwm [3], scrotwm [4], spectrwm [5] and i3wm [6].
laid to rest April 2014
bitwise
The name is inspired from performing bitwise operations on binary data.
A cheeky 10” netbook of the MSI U100 variety, this little wonder ran a minimal openbox [2] setup, along with pytyle for easy window management. It travelled quite a bit and is proof of what can be achieved with small screens.
Despite the mobile processor and small battery, it handled encrypted partitions with finesse. And don’t even ask how I managed to GIMP on it, because I did and managed very well.
I got bitwise somewhere around 2010 and would you believe that it is still running strong!
multivac
The name is inspired from the fictional supercomputer [8] in many Isaac Asimov stories.
With a red metal finish, this z570 Lenovo laptop ideapad has spaced buttons that are great to press. The topside speakers make good noise too.
It’s multi-boot setup used to run both stable and sid Debians [9] of the Crunchbang [1] flavour, customised with i3wm [6] and hooked with xbindkeys.
Multivac has since been reinstalled with vanilla Debian [9], I compiled the XServer and window managers myself as an experiment in minimalism.
Still kicking it around as a spare machine.
geex
The name is inspired by what it ran: GeeXboX [7].
The PC previously known as calculator. It was the HTPC mark II, and played many a music video and zombie movie.
repurposed in April 2014
phoenix
The name is inspired by mythical machines that have risen from the ashes.
necropolis was laid to rest, geex was repurposed, and phoenix was born.
This machine handled up to 3 operating systems, the main being a Debian [9] rolling release on the testing repository. It ran both openbox [2] and i3wm [6].
I eventually donated this machine to the local Linux User Group.
deimos
The name is inspired by both the moon of Mars, and by the game Doom, where the events in the game take place.
Deimos is my current daily machine. It's a Lenovo V15-IIL laptop running a stock Debian Trixie. I use the KDE Plasma desktop, first time actually using KDE as my primary DE and I do really like it.
It's set up on my desk, connected to a display and mechanical keyboard via a KVM switch, so that I can toggle between deimos and my nine-to-five workstation easily.