Today's Saturday. The previous week was kind of fun. On Wednesday I took my son (he's 14) to Linux Expo in NYC. We wandered around the exhibit hall, picking up free things, and at the end of the day we attended the "Golden Penguin Bowl". It was a fun afternoon.

In one issue of "Linux Journal" that was given out at the Expo, there is an article on how to set up a wireless router using a Linux machine. The idea is obvious: set up a machine with two network cards, one normal and one wireless, configure it to route and you're done.

The author suggested to use an old laptop for this sort of thing. As it turns out I have a couple of old laptops collecting dust under my desk (one is a 486 based, the other P90) and they would be perfect for this job.

So today I'm fiddling with this laptop. I had installed Debian on it while ago, and now I started to play more with dpkg and apt-get. I can see how this packaging system can be addictive. It's less fancy, just command line, but it sure makes it easy to add or remove packages. The ability to get the stuff over the net. Real cool. I did update my whole distribution to come up to more recent code, although this is still "potato".

I was able to add one network card, configure networking, and then get up on the net. Now I'm building emacs. Mind you this machine has only 16M of memory and 512M disk.

Next I need to figure out what wireless cards to get and finish setting it up as a router.

MP3 CD for today is Miles Davis...