New Hardware
After four years of the same old Athlon 1 GHz, I finally have some new hardware. It’s quite fun not to have to wait for anything to load. I’m not going to a big nerd and go on about the specs, however, I do want to write a bit about what works and what does not work with Linux, since it’s quite a different set-up than I’ve had previously.
RAID: my motherboard has on-board “fakeraid” which is poorly supported by the Linux kernel. I wanted RAID 1 (mirroring) and the current kernel (without crazy patches, which I hate doing) doesn’t do any redundancy checking when reading/writing from the RAID array, which basically makes the array useless. So I’m doing software RAID with Linux, which seems to be working well.
SMP kernel: I have a 64 bit dual core cpu. Installed linux-image-k7 worked great — it automatically is running with both cores, no configuring. Didn’t even require a special SMP kernel — it’s all one in. Very convenient.
(Why am I running a 32 bit kernel? Because, quite frankly, 64 bit sounds like a bit of a pain with drivers and the like. It’s just easier to stick with 32 bit for now.)
NVIDIA TwinView: I’m running binary NVidia drivers on my box, with two monitors — my existing ViewSonic widescreen and a regular 4:3 square Dell that I bought from a friend. TwinView is nice becaue I don’t have to worry about annoyances from some of the other lame ways of running dual-head with X. However, one of its major limitations is the inability to run a different DPI on each monitor. So far, I think it’s okay and my fonts aren’t screwy. But I’m kind of paranoid about it since the KDE login screen is quite badly distorted.
Google Earth: I can run Google Earth now, which seems incredibly cool. Except it doesn’t render correctly and I have no idea why.
Multimedia keys: It was surprisingly easy to set-up my multimedia keys on my Microsoft (gasp!) natural keyboard.
That is all for now.
