Binary Badass

The other day, I was thinking to myself about how nice it would be if I could install a couple of packages onto my WRT54G router running Tomato so that I could have my IM client be perpetually active. Then I thought that it is just a router and that I shouldn’t be concerning myself with running stuff like that on it. I also thought to myself how interesting low-power computing really is. All I really wanted the box to be able to do was to keep a persistent screen session running and to have a few small applications running on it. I have several older computers lieing around that I wouldn’t exactly call “low power” and being that I am a little bit sensitive as to what my electrical bill is and try to trim it wherever possible, I was contemplating the purchase of an Asus EEE PC desktop to use for that. Then I remembered that I had something similar albeit slightly antiquated; a PowerPC-based Mac Mini.

Having previously purchased a Kill-A-Watt, I was in a position where I could easily ascertain the power consumption of any device which uses a 110 VAC connection. I plugged my Mac Mini into it and determined that at idle, it consumes approximately 14 watts. Impressive, considering that the EEE PC desktop consumes approximately 20 watts.

As I’m sure you all know, Apple hasn’t been shy with their OS releases lately. This Mac Mini shipped with OS X 10.3 installed on it. While OS X 10.4 would have supported the PowerPC platform, I did not want to migrate it to the newer version of OS X. Enter Ubuntu. Some mainstream versions of Linux support alternative platforms (non-x86 platforms) and Ubuntu was one of them. Considering that I am very familiar with Ubuntu due to using it in my personal and professional lives, it was a no-brainer to install it onto the Mac Mini. Doing so was just as easy if not easier than performing an OS X install on it except that I didn’t have to run to the Apple Store first.

I decided to load the system down by compiling a Linux kernel which uses the make -j option. Essentially, the -j option spawns one compiler job for each source file it finds; which is a lot of compiler jobs to say the least. Interestingly enough, that little box is pretty noisy when its thrashing and kicking off lots of heat. Peak electrical consumption on this little box is around 30 watts which is still impressive considering that the average home light bulb consumes 60 watts.

Within 30 minutes of installing Ubuntu 8.04, I had OpenSSH, a LAMP stack installed and all of the applications I use the most, finch, irssi, screen, emacs and wget. The whole purpose of this system is to be a remotely-accessed server with everything running entirely inside of screen sessions without using the overhead of graphical user interfaces. The point of doing things this way is to keep things in a constant state no matter where I am and to keep everything secure; none of the data my applications use will actually traverse the network link and for what does traverse the network link, it is encrypted by ssh.