My roommate really has caught my interest with his Aleutia computer. I have a strong feeling that "green PCs" are going to become all the rage in a very short amount of time (see energy crisis), at least here in the States. Now that the Aleutia E2 has come out (their next generation in computers), I'm even more interested than I was before. The bill for one of those babies is around $386.25.

However I'm not sure that I could justify putting out that kind of money at this point. I'm really satisfied with my current desktop dual-booting Windows and Arch and I'd really like to save my extra dollars so that I can pick up the T-Mobile android phone due out in October. But I digress.

My roommate certainly does sacrifice the power of a more expensive desktop PC, but he's found a few programs that aid in the process of every-day computer usage. Not to mention he's found Micropolis. If I were using that low powered of a machine, though, I think there are some changes that I'd make to his normal lineup of programs.

For starters, he uses Opera. How he manages to do this and not loose his mind is beyond me. I would personally be running dillo or dillo2 (when it becomes stable, of course... late this month or next according to their website). He also uses Sonata to connect to our Music server in the room (which is running amazingly, by the way). Once again, I'd be using something more lightweight, such as ncmpcpp. He uses XFE which I would highly recommend for his build. Other than that I'm not entirely sure what else he's running (I think he's using feh for his wallpaper).

And as if this post wasn't unstructured enough, here's another little blurb: I recently saw that Wicd was updated in the arch repos. The new setup is nice, but they moved some files around. For example, their wpa_supplicant encryption files are now located in /etc/wicd/encryption. Not too big of a deal, I suppose. It just required me moving my University's wireless config from point A (/usr/lib/wicd/encryption/templates) to point B (/etc/wicd/encryption/templates) and then adding the name of the file in the "active" file. They had also changed the naming scheme around for the tray icon program (wicd-client) which I had to fix in my .xinitrc file. No biggy.

I do like wicd's new GUI interface. More options plus the choice to choose dhclient or dhcpcd. It figures they add this only a few days after I find out how to make both dhclient AND dhcpcd not mess with /etc/resolv.conf file. Oh well. The new version also adds the option to share a username/password across SSIDs of the same name which is a major time saver here at the University where I'd otherwise have to key in my passphrase in public places. Eeek.