Yesterday the local and network broadcast television "news" shows led with "black Friday" stories. It's the biggest day of the year for US retailers. "Black" refers to black ink, that is, making a profit.

I was surprised to hear the San Francisco TV and radio "news" stations mention Buy Nothing Day in their coverage. They were surprisingly sympathetic. That is, they didn't apply the "what a bunch of nutballs" slant used against most protest movements.

Fry's had gigabyte memory modules for five bucks and a works-with-Linux laser printer for fifty, both after the rebates, both "while supplies last." I stayed home. They'll go on sale again within the month. They also had a four-core CPU and motherboard under $200, first time I've seen that.

Meanwhile, I have two used computers. I've replaced the wear-out parts (fans and hard drive) in both. Charlotte bought a new computer and gave me her old one, a seven year old 800 MHz Celeron box with Windoze 2K on it. Too old and slow to run MS-Windoze Vista. It's one of those Dell consumer desktop boxes with the weird motherboard so hardware upgrades are impractical. I put Ubuntu GNU+X+Linux on it and it runs pretty well. That is, Openoffice.org is quite usable, and Youtube and Skype work. Ubuntu comes with a decent software phone, too. I think the Green Party will donate it for our raffle prize at the San Jose Holiday Peace Fair.

The second used computer is Petra-k. It's a 1.6 GHz Athlon with two GB of RAM. This machine served greens.org (and ninety other domains) for three years, and it rocks. (Intel's Pentium 4 is burdened with a ton of special purpose, energy sucking hardware to make video games run more smoothly. It's a game CPU. Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon is a general purpose CPU with a cache big enough to work right, and Petra-k runs rings around my supposedly faster 2.4 GHz P4 desktop machine, on less energy.) Ubuntu runs well. Not sure how I'm going to sell it, maybe a silent auction. The machine comes with a lot of good karma from all the Green work it's done.

You can buy a mail order Dell with Ubuntu preloaded, instead of Microsoft. Their customer service can't support Ubuntu any more than they can really support MS-Windows, but they guarantee the hardware is usable with Linux. They had to offer it after some trade press gossip columnist caught Michael Dell running Ubuntu on *his* laptop and they got a hundred thousand emails about it. Ubuntu is easier to install and maintain than MS-Windows, and far more stable and secure. Downside is you need DSL or cable to keep up with its frequent automatic updates.

But before you do that, look at the artisan PC builders who have been selling non-Microsoft PCs for years. Emperor Linux, Penguin Computing, ASAcomputers.com, Silicon Mechanics... Dozens of these little guys advertise in Linux Journal. Maybe the mom&pop PC builder in your town does it.

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