First, a friend at work turned me on to a great 3rd party firmware upgrade for my Linksys WRT54G wireless router. DD-WRT adds a tonne of new features the router and increases it’s value 10 fold if you enjoy monkeying around with networking. It allows you CLI access into the linux side of the router, as well as some good software for creating a managed wireless hotspot. Very cool…I may even set up some public access for people to use. I think I can allocate a certain amount of bandwidth as well as lock out certain services (Bittorrent etc) so that people would be free to check their email, but not hog my connection.

Second on my nerdy entertainment list was to set up Ubuntu Server v6.10.

My original plan was to pull out my old VIA EPIA M series mini motherboard and some old pieces of hardware, put it all in a shoe box and go, but unfortunately I got nowhere with that as the motherboard seems to be dead.

So I tried going to the new local Tigerdirect to get some used or refurbished hardware like an old notebook or junker PC to run it on, but I came up empty handed. (Old hardware is ok for a non GUI linux box that’s just going to be a sandbox and my home intranet web server etc…)

Then I remembered that microsoft had recently made their Virtual PC 2004 software free to download so I grabbed it and set up a virtual pc on my main system and installed Ubuntu on that. It’s actually pretty cool. So now my main pc is both a Windows XP and a Linux box in one, and I can just SSH into the linux side to monkey around with it and ftp files to my new web server. Wonderfully enough, Ubuntu Server has the option to install LAMP so all the hard stuff related to installing a web server is done during the initial install of the OS.

There you have it, my nerdy weekend in a nutshell.