Taiga

Taiga is an iBook (Mid-2005 model) that used to be my best friend's "netbook"; he decided to give it up for something better, since the lack of Flash irked him (Adobe stopped supporting Flash for the Power PC architecture). Taiga is named after Aisaka Taiga from Toradora! as my best friend has a thing for her (LOL).

Taiga's keyboard didn't work all that well, and when he gave her to me, the keyboard pretty much stopped working correctly. Quite a while later, I took the keyboard apart and found a lot of the track was oxidised, but I didn't feel like it was worth cleaning.

Since Taiga has a bit more processing power than Sae-chan (albeit a whopping 0.07GHz) and the lack of a functioning keyboard, I decided to use Taiga as the BitTorrent server. At first, I just used her stock hard drive, but while I was trying to get to sleep the night that I set her up, I kept hearing the hard drive click for power-saving mode every so often. The next day, I decided to grab the Compact Flash to IDE convertor and install 10.4 on the 32GB CF card so that Taiga would run silently. Even though the read/write speed was slower (I don't know by how much), performance wasn't hampered by that much - only becoming slow when I was trying to use TenFourFox.

10.4.11 made things awkward for me because I didn't have any other choice but to use HFS+ for the external hard drive, since NTFS would use more processor power to translate, and FAT32 wouldn't be able to support DVD-sized ISOs. I used 10.4's built-in FTP service to transfer files from the external to Mei-chan once, and it became a horrible mess, as some of the files were broken (I checked with MD5 checksums), so I decided after that to not use it again, deeming it unreliable. I then just unplugged the drive from Taiga and plugged it into Mei-chan, which did better, but still had a couple or so problems with either copying and/or MD5 sum generation (usually fixed by unplugging and plugging the drive back in).

After the Apple PowerMac G5 project, I decided that Debian PPC would be a better environment to run under, seeing how nice it was on the G5, and after some extensive testing with Sae-chan (and file transferring to an ext4-formatted external hard drive), I went ahead with the installation. I formatted the external HFS+ drive (to ext4) after checking the MD5s, then transferred all the files back, checking the MD5s one last time. It was nice to see that there wasn't any errors at all, and once I got Taiga and Transmission (BitTorrent program) set back up, I (slowly) started the torrents back up, finding that the rest of the files that weren't checked also survived both transfers.

It's nice to not to have to worry about having to plug in a keyboard, as there is a virtual keyboard I can use in its stead if I'm doing light typing (I plug in a USB keyboard if I'm going to be doing heavy typing); It's also nice that the RAM usage is only 100 something MB out of 700 something MB of RAM.

(I know I've pretty much went into Taiga's complete history, but I don't have it anywhere else on the site.)

Taiga's doing her job well, and seems to be performing a bit better with Debian than with 10.4.11.



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