Following my fun in July when I hit a bit of a wall in playing with large data sets and brought my mac mini to a grinding halt, I ruminated on next steps. Wall aside, it was a wee bit frustrating that running experiments on larger data sets took a long time to run and that’s been a bit off-putting to further progress. So I decided that I really did a new machine and was going to get an intel NUC skull canyon as it was small and fast. I waited for Intel to announce their new 8th generation CPUs which they did recently. Unfortunately the upgrade to the current 6th generation Skull isn’t due till Q2 2018.

On the other hand, prices have been dropping on the barebones Skull and you can pick one up for around AUD$700. However a retailer pointed out to me recently that the ASUS VivoMini, while pricier, uses 7th generation CPUs. Plus it’s a cuter box. After some umming and ahhing, I ordered the vivomini with 32GB RAM and an additional 1TB drive (it includes a 256GB SSD in the m.2 port). The CPU is a 7th generation quad core i7. Total cost was around AUD$1,700 whereas a similarly set up Skull would have been around $1,400-500. It has a small footprint and sits nicely on top of the mac mini.

Picked it up yesterday and it booted straight into windows. Today, somewhat trepidatiously, I had a go at setting it up to dual boot with linux. The last few years I’ve been running linux via virtualbox on windows and that’s been sufficient. It’s been a long, long, long time since I set up a dual boot machine and that was using debian which was a wee bit challenging at the time.

This time round it was all easy as. I followed some straightforward instructions carefully and tested initially on a live boot via USB and then used that USB to install it properly. I’ve booted back and forth between windows and linux several times just to be sure and so far so good. I’m currently writing this blog via firefox in ubuntu. My next step was going to be to set up warcbase however that’s been deprecated as Ian Milligan and his team have received a new grant and are working on building an updated environment under their Archives Unleashed Toolkit. So I’ll play with that instead :) Regardless I’ll still need to get Apache Spark up and running which is likely my next step.