There was another useless post on Slashdot asking what did you first do with Linux?. I thought it would be interesting to recollect that experience. Sorry for the detail, my memory produces lots of random tidbits. I was fortunate enough to attend an engineering school with the latest technologies that were available in the market. Which basically means we had Sun Ultra Workstations, running Solaris Operating System using CDE. So for me “Unix = Sun”.

Newer versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader have provided the feature for users to edit the contents of form fields in a PDF file. Depending on the permissions set by the author of the PDF file, Acrobat Reader will allow or deny the ability to save the file with the form edits in place. The United States IRS has allowed for this functionality in recent years in its official tax forms, which is great for people who might otherwise need to fill out forms with pen.

In certain scenarios I am a little skeptical of Linux and open source applications as worthwhile competitors for closed source or proprieraty alternatives. This is not to say I do not think that there is any lack in potential. In my opinion I do disagree with some choices made by open source projects or linux distributions. In any event the point of this post is not to argue any of that.

A great deal of the following is all old news. Adobe has has Flash Plugin for x86_64 Linux architecture in Beta since Oct 2008. The only thing, is that since it is provided in a tarball (.tar.gz), you are better off builing an RPM (spec file). Note that the 32bit i386 version still works perfectly with nspluginwrapper. Similarily Sun has released the Java JRE web plugin for x86_64 archictecture. Installation is the very identical to 32bit.

After identifying exactly what my local linux server requirements were, I decided to take a good look at my hardware options. From the start, I wanted to (1) save money, (2) save electricity/power and (3) minimize noise. To address these issues, there were many decisions I made. First of all I did not need any peripherals. The server could be entirely “headless” (i.e. no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse, etc). The primary things of value are: disk storage, memory, cpu and network.