It Only Cost A Dime...IF....You've Got The TIme!!! 1165

Linux costs a lot more than that. I've only got 20K dial-up here at home but things get a little crazy when I'm on the road and can find a truckstop with broadband wifi. I find a linux site, put the laptop on download, and let 'er rip all night at a full 54 Mbps while I sleep.

So I started out a little over a year ago with a 40G HD which quickly filled up. Driving a truck keeps you pretty busy so I just didn't have the time to sit there burning all that stuff to CD. I started to buy another 40G but figured WTF and got a 100G. Good thing I went for the larger drive because it was filled in no time.

Well, what can you do? I had to give it up for awhile, then finally found a Fry's with a parking lot big enough for a truck. I ran in and grabbed a 100G USB drive.

Filled that one up, too.

After about a month of download deprivation I found a Best Buy I could get into. Bought a third 100G USB drive.

Yup, filled that one up.

I was packing files everywhere, burning a few to CD whenever I could to free up space, putting the smaller ones on flashcards originally intended for my digital camera, found a box of floppies I'd brought along for making boot disks and filled those up...

I finally realized that CD's would never cut it. I needed a laptop that could burn dual-layer DVD's so that I could start moving this stuff to optical storage while I slept and only have to wake up once an hour to change discs. So I picked up a new laptop and $200 worth of dual-layer DVD blanks. But things got busy again and before I ever got around to burning DVD's I'd filled up so much of the 60 gig HD that my all-important GPS software was getting flaky and had to stop.

Then not too long ago a relative got sick and I had to take extended leave to help out. Knowing I'd be off the road for awhile, I deleted my two GPS-mapping programs and about 1.2 gigs of map data, and on my final nights on the way home I downloaded every night until finally Windows gasped its last breath.

In all, about 400 Gigs of downloads. Not bad for a year's work. I have not only Fedora Core 4 install and source CD's, but I have nearly all of the FC4-i386 and -x64 Extras and updates directories - about 5 gigs worth of files. (sadly, FC5 came out just before I finally got to go home, and I only got the 4 install and 4 source CD's but no extra's or updates). I have all 14 of the Debian CD's. I have FreeBSD 6.0 i386 and FreeBSD 6,0 amd64 and about 7.5 gigs of FreeBSD ports. I have PCBSD, FREESBIE, Knoppix, gentoo, ubuntu, SuSE, probably everything that cheapbytes has and then some.

So, Linux has cost me a 100 gig internal HD($200), two 100G USB HD's ($400 for both), $200 worth of CD and DVD blanks, an $800 laptop, and around $400 for all my wifi accounts at various truckstops.

But, hey, look at all the money I'm saving on free software!