- I have a seven year old nephew who I would like to find some computing activities that we could do together. Any ideas?
I do not recommend using a seven year old as a server for the following reasons.
- their parents will get mad
- the neighbors might call the police about all the children you have racked in your basement
- they have poor computing power, wait until they’re at least in their late teens (although software updates come too late and the system is usually very unstable at that time.)
- think of the smell! your house will smell like a kindergarten
- food costs are already high enough, add two or four growing kids to that budget and it’s far cheaper to run a couple Dell R610s every month.
overall, not worth it mate. good luck though!
@GreenKnight23 I aggree totally but comparing their LLM to the 2.5 year old… Its consideribly more advanced… though it still seems to overuse words like ‘why’, ‘when’ and 'do you have $20 for this game"
They are also very noisy, so a basement location might not be enough to suppress the humming and yelling from reaching your living areas.
@walden This conversation feels like it has taken a dark turn and could be used against me in court one day …but to be clear…houses generally dont have basements in new zealand
Yeah… I hesitated to hit “submit”, but figured the courts would rule in our favor because courts have a good sense of humor!
A Minecraft server is the classic.
Don’t discount just putting together a basic webpage that can be accessed at home too- something he could put together in a basic HTML editor (drag and drop) and put his favorite things on or whatever he may be focusing on (cars, animals, space, you name it).
OP, just wanted to say that involving your young nephew in constructive computer projects/activities is super cool. You get a Good Noodle star on your chart.
@irmadlad Thanks. I live a long way away amd only get to visit occasionally so as they get older the opportunity to do things together online is important to me.
I showed interest at around this age and my dad showed me CentOS and building basic webpages. I didn’t take too much interest in that, but I asked him if we could build a Counter Strike server and he obliged. He’s a nerd himself so we had a static IP for the server and everything. Worked well!
Anyway, I would recommend getting an old desktop and installing Ubuntu server or desktop edition with a desktop environment. Show him how to navigate the command line and what that means if you follow the file explorer at the same time. And then hosting very basic things(webpages, local game servers, etc.).
He might really latch onto it, or might not be interested whatsoever. I latched onto it, ended up building my own PCs soon after, and have my own homelab and I work as a full time Linux sysadmin now.
@eli I have an old Windows laptop. I need to figure out how to do dual boot with Linux … and get my vpn sorted (again) so he can use VMs on my Proxmox box
I have an old Windows laptop. I need to figure out how to do dual boot with Linux
For this I would recommend:
- Install Windows first
- In Windows, partition the disk drive to how much storage you want. So if you have a 1TB, then maybe do 500GB for Windows and 500GB for Linux? Leave the new partition as unformatted/unallocated
- Boot up your linux installer and select the unformatted/unallocated partition for Linux to install to. Don’t erase whole disk. But let Linux setup all of it’s own formatting and partitions on the empty space
Now why do it this way? Because Windows does NOT like the boot manager being replaced and does NOT like disk space go “missing” unless it allocates it itself. If you install Windows first it’ll setup the boot manager for Windows and then when you install Linux grub will get installed and that can manage Windows pretty well.
And if you let Windows partition off the blank space for Linux then Windows knows that that empty partition isn’t owned by Windows anymore and it won’t freak out seeing the space go missing when Linux takes it over.
This article covers most: https://linuxblog.io/dual-boot-linux-windows-install-guide/
If you have two individual disk drives then I would do the same thing, install Windows on one of the drives, boot into Windows, and make sure the second drive shows up in disk utility, but it isn’t formatted for use in Windows, just unallocated/blank. Then when you install Linux you just tell it to install onto the second drive.
and get my vpn sorted (again) so he can use VMs on my Proxmox box
I would 100% recommend Tailscale for this. You can install Tailscale on the Proxmox host and then have your nephew have his own Tailscale account where you can give him access to only the Proxmox box.
I do this with my Proxmox boxes so I can remotely manage them wherever I am. When you first install Tailscale on Proxmox it may require a reboot, so I would recommend being nearby the server so you can login physically if needed, but after it has been smooth sailing for me. Been using it like this for a year or two now.
Of course just a suggestion.
@eli Thanks. Appreciate it. I have a VPN configured between the different locations and subnets I have at the moment with a bit if policy based routing to control what can access what… I just bring the remote location back online
