Snape
From Pigasoftware
Snape is Piga Software's Laptop. It runs dual boot with a small Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 partition with a larger Fedora 8 GNU/Linux partition from which must functions are performed. It replaced Flitwick which was formerly called Snape. It is a refurbished Dell Latitude D600. The laptop is webmaster and developer Graham L. Wilson's primary development computer. It's name comes from Severus Snape of the Harry Potter books.
On the naming scheme: "I don't know how we ended up on Harry Potter names, since we have never liked them that much, they are okay stories, a little annoying at times, but overall decent. The main point of it was to continue the tradition of comparing Microsoft to a famous fictional evil. Star Wars and Star Trek references have been overdone and Harry Potter was another famous fictional universe to reference (we name our Windows computers and virtual machines after the villains and the GNU/Linux computers after the hero's names). Though I do have my gripes against J.K. Rowling and her publishers due to copyright bullying and abuses, see: http://www.stallman.org/harry-potter.html" - Graham L. Wilson.
History
- 2007: Graham is increasingly unhappy with his current main computer: Flitwick. Particularity its small hard-drive and Windows operating system.
- February 2008: the refurbished Dell Latitude D600 is purchased from Tiger Direct.ca. It arrives running Windows XP.
- Flitwick was known as Snape until this point, the name was transfered to the new laptop and the old receives its new name.
- March 2008: Fedora 8 GNU/Linux is installed (set up as dual boot), many GAMBAS projects from Griffindor are transferred.
- June-July 2008: Computer temporarily out of action due to power cord malfunction. Brought back into action in early July.
Future Plans
- Summer 2009, wipe hard drive and do a fresh install of Fedora 11, machine will no longer dual-boot, but might run windows in a virtual machine using virtual-box
