brentashley

ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) just announced they have now entered Phase 4 of their IPv4 Countdown, whereby only one /8 address block (in aggregate) remains to be allocated.

Between Phase 2 and Phase 3, the 3rd-last /8 was depleted in 11 months. It took only 8 months for the penultimate /8 to go, so it would be optimistic to think that there will be any IPv4 addresses available by the end of 2014.

You may want to look at ARIN’s IPv4 Depletion FAQ to see how this will affect you.

If you have not done so, it’s time to get familiar with IPv6. I recommend you start at IPv6.net, where you can find a ton of resources.

Being that it’s XP End of Support Day, I made sure this past weekend that there is no more XP in my home environment.

I still have Windows 7 Ultimate on my trusty yet crusty Dell 9400 and Win7 Pro on Clare’s Lenovo SFF desktop, however the one remaining XP instance was the kitchen machine, a venerable IBM T60 Thinkpad with 2G RAM.

The kitchen machine is used for general web browsing, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Skype, RDP/VNC client and sometimes playing music. I needed all these things to work just as easily as before, including the cheap USB webcam and mic, and the wireless network.

I installed 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop by downloading the ISO image to my Macbook Air and burning it to a DVD with my USB DVD drive, then booting up on the DVD. I used all defaults except for system name. When the system came up for the first time I used Firefox to download the Chrome package, installed it with the package manager, and then did the same with Skype. I used Pidgin to connect to Yahoo Messenger. In about 45 minutes and with a minimum of fuss, I had everything working. I set up accounts for my family, connected to wireless, and left it on the kitchen counter.

So far the only problem I have is that the video driver will only do 1024×768 and not the full native 1400×1050 that the T60 allows. This is not a big issue since Clare and I both need reading glasses now. Skype video is even clearer than it was on XP. My daughter started playing music with Grooveshark and it just worked. There are Office-compatible programs installed by default. Remote desktop access works great for both RDP and VNC hosts.

I heartily recommend Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop as a great XP replacement with a fantastic out-of-the-box experience. You may also want to try Linux Mint.