Griffindor

Griffindor is a workstation used by Piga Software, and is the primary machine of BDFL Hamish Wilson. The machin's name comes from a misspelling of the word &quot;Gryffindor&quot;, from the Harry Potter books. Griffindor runs the Arch Linux operating system, which functions as a rolling release. It previously ran varying versions Fedora, starting with a partition containing Fedora Core 6 installed on New Year's Day 2006, with it becoming the main system after installing Fedora 7 in the spring of 2007, which also heralded Piga switching development over to Gambas. They continued upgrading this system until Hamish Wilson, the network's system administrator, decided that he wished to try out Arch. Before Fedora, it ran versions of Microsoft Windows ranging from 98 to XP (which co-habited with Fedora over 2006). At some points of its Fedora lifespan, it also ran XP as a virtual machine (Scabbers).

On the naming scheme: &quot;I don't know how we ended up on Harry Potter names, since we have never liked them in particular, compared to anything else. 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 heroes' names). Though I do have my gripes against J.K. Rowling, and particularly her publishers, due to copyright bullying and abuses, see: http://www.stallman.org/harry-potter.html&quot; - Graham L. Wilson.

Specifications

 * Distribution: Arch Linux
 * Graphics Driver: R600 Gallium3D Driver
 * Desktop Environment: Xfce with compositing


 * Motherboard: MSI 760GM-E51(FX)
 * Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE 3.2 Ghz
 * Video Card: Diamond AMD Radeon HD 4670
 * Memory: 4 Gigabytes DDR3 PC10666, 1333 MHz
 * Boot Drive: 500 GB Western Digital Caviar Black

Unknown Dates
These events are listed in approximate order of occurrence, pre-dating traceable dates (pre 2006)
 * EMachines computer purchased, running Windows 98, given network name &quot;Education&quot;.
 * Education renamed too &quot;Griffindor&quot;.
 * Griffindor's power supply dies, new power supply requires new case, Griffindor is transplanted to a new case.
 * With the need for disk space increasing Griffindor receives a new motherboard, capable of handling larger hard drives.
 * Griffindor's Hard drives are upgraded to two 40 GB drives.
 * Griffindor's Motherboard dies, replacement requires a new case.
 * Griffindor's main HDD is upgraded to an 80 GB drive.

Known Dates

 * January 2006: Griffindor runs Fedora Core 4 alongside Windows XP (dual boot).
 * Spring 2007: Griffindor runs Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux primarily.
 * April 2007: Free Empires for GNU/Linux is first started on Griffindor.
 * August 2007: Upgraded to Fedora 7 GNU/Linux, GNU/Linux now running full time.
 * May 18, 2008: Upgraded to Fedora 9 GNU/Linux.
 * December 2008: Upgraded to Fedora 10 GNU/Linux.