Constructing Zephyr
For many months I have been complaining about the slowness of my main computer, which was improved when njan kindly sent me 256MB of ram, improving things to 512MB in all, a few months ago. But despite this things were still not brilliant and additionally my video card did not have the capabilities necessary to play any recent games at all, even on the lowest graphics settings. Specifically, I waited for and bought Oblivion very shortly after it came out at full price (in fact, I pre-ordered it on Amazon with vouchers I’d got for Christmas) and have never actually been able to use it. I have lent it to friends to make use of over the years but this and the general slowness of things have encouraged me to finally save up and build a new one. After several birthdays of receiving funds to add to my account, I finally decided that I had enough to build over this half-term, a couple of weeks ago. Ordering on the Wednesday before the week off, I was confident that I would have sufficient time to build over the week. Fat chance.
I put my components list together with the help of PhilKC from freenode but as I left it in an online shopping basket over several days, several items went in and out of stock. Eventually when I ordered both the motherboard and graphics card were out of stock and so the wait began. I will spare you the details of having the expected dates changing around and e-mails contradicting my order details view, but in the end I ended up ordering my motherboard and a nice new keyboard elsewhere. So I ended up building during an incredibly busy school time, which is far from ideal. In addition to these purchases I got a 21″ CRT monitor off eBay for just ~£23 bringing my total to around £720. I am still at this point trying to work out how I am going to get this monitor home from its location in a nearby town.
The actual physical building of things went pretty much trouble free. The most difficult parts for me were attaching the CPU to the motherboard and applying the heat-conducting grease which is a fiddly task, and I was concerned that things were getting too hot and that I had done it wrong. Phil was a great help over IRC and we decided that it was sufficiently safe. I soon found however that my case really doesn’t have enough space for wires and wiring up my floppy drive (which I left disconnected until after I had stress-tested my memory) and hard drive was incredibly difficult. I got the floppy cables the wrong way at first and so this had to be fixed. Fortunately, I only needed to rotate the end that was easier to rotate… At this point, everything physical is done except for the power LED and USB ports on the front, which don’t seem to be working. Annoyingly, my motherboard doesn’t have the capability to have a system/case speaker, which is something I was very used to using for beeping at me when I received messages on IRC.
Windows installed easily enough, for playing games, except that I had to go find a USB keyboard as the installation didn’t like my PS/2 one, but it works fine now. I have strengthened Windows up with anti-virus and the like and got it fully up-to-date. However, my intention had long been to use Ubuntu as my main operating system and also leave some space free for another flavour of Linux. After battling to get the live cd to run, it was clear that all was not right. As I find with my NSLU2, my router does not provide nix systems with the right DNS servers so I have to reconfigure this on every startup. That is not a huge problem: what is is the huge effort required for my graphics card and Ubuntu to make friends, allowing me to use Ubuntu’s fantastic visual effects, provided by Compiz Fusion, which makes windows bounce around and fade and desktops rotate on a nice cube. My graphics card chipset, the nVidia 8800GT is specifically not supported by Ubuntu and so I had to use various workarounds. It was not particularly fun, and upgrading to the next major version of ubuntu is going to be a pain, but I am quite happy to have the pretty effects.
All that is left for me to do at this point before I can wire Zephyr (named due to my naming scheme of Greek gods, goddesses and letters) into my desk is to transfer the data from my old 80GB hard drive that I have had for about five and a half years. This is far, far easier said than done, and at this point everything across the network that I have tried has failed. It may be that the only way to successfully transfer the data is to physically move the HDD into my new computer, but I am loath to do that if it can be avoided. I need all my saved games, but data is held on my NSLU2, so there is no real rush to get this sorted.
nVidia are normally pretty good for drivers. So it might be they’ve released Linux binaries for the 8800GT by the time Hard Heron comes along.
*Hardy Heron.
‘Concerned that things were getting too hot’… I’d say that 95C is a bit hot…