My first experience of distributed computing was distributed.net. I have contributed a few years of processing to their RC5 (encryption challenges) and OGR (mathematical curiosities) projects. More recently I switched to Grid.org, which is run by many of the same people. This seemed more worthy as it involves searching for cures for cancer and other diseases.

Grid.org is not available on Linux, but some people have made it run by devious means. For simplicity I was just running distributed.net on my Linux box. I had heard about Folding at Home a while back, but never got around to trying it. This is another medical project with similar scope to Grid.org, but wider support for non-Windows platforms. Well I've tried it and it works on this old PC. The question is whether it will complete a work unit before the preset deadline. There are ways around this that I may have to investigate. I don't really want a PC on all the time at the moment due to the noise and power consumption. For now I don't need that facility either, so the PC will be on when it is needed. The deadline is the middle of next month and I'm away for work in between, so I may miss it.

I've thought for a long time now that all those PCs around the world that just do nothing whilst waiting for the user to do something should be put to some use. There are lots of possible projects you can run that do not affect normal usage and may end up doing some good.

I used to run Windows 2000 on my main PC (Duron 1200) until it started playing up and crashing most times I tried to boot it. That was when I decided it was time to move to Linux and installed Madrake 10 on the slightly slower Duron 800 PC. That's been running nicely for a while, but that PC had a weedy 8GB hard drive that originated in my first PC. I've been meaning to 'upgrade' the Win2K PC to some form of Linux for a while. I had heard a lot about the various Debian distributions, especially Ubuntu. I got hold of the previus version to try it out.

The first problem was the at the Ricoh combo drive in that PC has been playing up for a while and does not always read CDs. This is a drive that cost about £150 a few years back when mere mortals were not able to write DVDs. So I swapped in an old CD drive. That was refusing to boot too until I worked out that the jumper was set wrong on the back. After that I got my first sight of the Ubuntu start-up screen. The excitement was short-lived as it was followed by a blank screen and a dead keyboard.

There may be an issue with the motherboard (Asus A7N266-VM) that uses an nVidia chipset. I'll investigate that angle. Meanwhile I'm downloading the latest version of Ubuntu to try out. If that doesn't work then I may investigate Knoppix and Mepis, both of which I have seen at the LUG. It may just take me a while to download them. I'm still waiting for ntl to upgrade my broadband to 2Mb.