Well the household still has 3 PCs – but they are all in the same room now. The idea is that I can drive the display in the lounge off a bedroom PC using VGA over Cat5 adapters and a wireless keyboard / mouse, and this means I can cap the number of the computers in the house at three while making maximum use of them all the time. That has benefits to me in the bedroom where I do most of my computing, as it means I can go back to having the two best computers both running Xubuntu (one for general work and one just for video playback) and just a small lower powered computer doing the occasional Windows tasks (scanner and cameras, DVD ripping, some image editing and stuff like that).
Bluetooth is one of the features in Xubuntu that is nicely implemented. I bought this dodgy USB bluetooth adapter a couple of weeks ago called a Bluemate 4. The problem was that the (Windows) software runs in evaluation mode and doesn’t actually come with a license. Apparently the answer to this problem is to buy the Bluemate 5 which does come with a license and sells for the same price. As it turns out when I took the adapter out of the Windows computer and put it into a Xubuntu PC, the built in bluetooth in Xubuntu worked straight out of the box and lets me do file transfers to my tablet, which is all I really wanted it for, just fine. Kudos to the retailer (Ascent) for giving me a credit on the price of it as well. It sort of makes up for that Dick Smith gift card being dishonoured at the beginning of this year when they went into receivership.
So putting Xubuntu back on the Ivy Bridge (B75) computer was as usual really fast once it could be booted – sometimes the boot gets hung up, or you have to try UEFI boot, or the regular boot, just whatever works. And that computer will be hooked up to the little TV I have in that room, and it will also be connected on its VGA output from the 2 head $50 video card it has, to the display in the lounge, which at the moment is an old one that only has VGA inputs. But sound could still be an issue and I have to figure out whether to get a converter that also puts sound down the same cable.
The tricky question is where to put the satellite set top box when it gets installed in a week or two. In the bedroom where I do the most watching, or in the lounge where it is nicer to sit on the couch? If it has only HDMI output, can it be adapted to VGA easily?
UPDATE: Well the latest solution has been a lot more radical and that was to move the computer desk out of the bedroom and into the living room. I found the idea of linking between rooms with cable to be relatively impractical and also the satellite box will be in the living room so it makes sense to bring everything together in one place. Still waiting on the satellite TV company to arrange the install and will be chasing them up this week to see where it has got to.