Success on one front. I have internet connectivity (typing this on my BSD machine…see). All I had to do was plug in the appropriate hardware (and ethernet NIC) and I was up and running. Thanks Desiree!

Success on another front. I have sound…or rather I have proved that I could have sound. I plugged in my other speakers. I think they are incorrectly powered for this machine (this thing only produces sound through powered speakers) because they don’t sound right. While I have sound, for some reason the CD Player thing doesn’t produce it. I am wondering if it is a memory problem. I suspect yes because even when I click the “test” button for sound it takes about 15 seconds for the test to actually sound off.

Now I have to see about getting the printer running. Then I will have a proper running home machine.

To answer your comment from the previous post, Grumpy Z:
Yes, internet. Yes, office (excel-like, word-like, powerpoint-like). I know the least about Quicken so I can’t say there is something that full featured out there. Yes, home network. That is actually what UNIX excels at. In fact a machine like this (UNIX, BSD, Linux, etc) is really good as a web server, or a file server, or a print server (which I have in mind for it), although this PC-BSD distribution is intended as primarily a desktop solution and there are others specifically “built” for those other purposes.

Boy that got long. All I intended to say was I have PC-BSD mostly running.

I acquired an older machine over the weekend from Mary’s parents. They bought a new Compaq and asked me if I would set it up for them.
I decided it would be fun to take their machine off their hands for them and practice wiping it clean. (For that I used Darik’s Boot and Nuke utility. It went pretty well and wiped the drive to something slightly less secure than the Department of Defense requires in about 2.5 hours.
After that I installed what is roughly described as a UNIX-like operating system called BSD. This particular variant is called PC-BSD. You can read a little lot about it on WikiPedia if you are interested. Or you can get it from the horses mouth.

It is pretty cool and fun so far and it looks to be capable of doing everything I would require of a desktop OS, like printing, writing documents, playing music, playing kids games (that come with it) etc…only one problem. The machine I acquired only has 64MB of RAM and the minimum recomendation for this OS is 128MB. It runs but it isn’t fun. And the printer doesn’t seem to react to commands and I don’t have the power brick for the speakers so I can’t prove the media player works either. {curses}

Oh yeah, and no ethernet card either so I can’t prove the internet capabilities either. {foiled again}

A quick search found that most current day operating systems recommend a minimum 128MB RAM. I can help (perhaps a great deal) by configuring a different desktop environment (similar I guess to say, turning off the WinXP Pro GUI interface and cranking it back down to Classic mode or something, the effect on memory/CPU usage is more drastic than that but similar concept). And I could always go ‘old school’ with an older version of another variant of BSD…but then it wouldn’t be so easy to install and configure as PC-BSD is/was.

I will update progress, if I make any, or if I end up changing the OS in the near future. There are so many options.

Everything has it’s limitations. Yes this Microwave hot water heater is not “subject to the volatile natural gas market” but it is subject to the least reliable (I think) system in a neighborhood, namely the electrical grid.
I would argue that natural gas, cable, telephone, water, and even mail is delivered on a more consistent, efficient, and reliable system than electricity. Okay, cell service dwarfs the problems the electrical grid has but people don’t freeze when their cell phone doesn’t work.
All that aside this new idea for a water heater sounds long overdue.
I would buy one.