New computer is working in a nice stable fashion although with no working USB for no reason that I can fathom. (Plug in a device and nothing happens. No kernel messages, etc)
I will document this properly a little later, and update the map to match.
All told the new machine is:
- Motherboard: Nvidia Nforce N570 SLi Chipset
- Processor: AMD X2 AM2 4200 Dual Core
- Memory: 1Gb. (2×512Mb)
- Disk: 1×320Gb SATA drive.
- Graphics: PCI-Express ATI Radeon Extreme AX300SE
The graphics give me 1280×1024 which is as much as I can handle on my 17” TFT display, and didn’t require any non-free drivers.
I wandered into a couple of local stores and said “I’m looking to buy a graphics card, what do you have in the PCI express flavour?”. The answers ranged from:
- Nothing .. sold out.
- NVIdia .. something .. £100+
- ATI Radeon £39.99
So whilst I wanted to get an NVIdia card since they traditionally have had drivers which work for me I was happy to get the cheaper one and hope for the best. As it turns out I’m using xserver-xorg-video-ati with no problems and playing DVDs over NFS works without any visible lagging/artifacts/errors.
The system has 512Mb to itself, and the rest set aside for Xen guests. Right now I have six instances of Sarge running with 64Mb each. Things are nice and snappy :) (Since debootstrap failed on the 64 bit install of Sarge I had to download pre-made Sarge images, but still a painless process.)
Talking of Xen I found a weird problem where when starting up a new Xen guest the host would lose networking. I think this is an artifact of the NVidia 4 chipset – but adding irqpoll to the boot flag(s) seems to have fixed it.
OK enough about my new toy(s). Happy Holidays
(No complaints about my new cheesy Christmas Logo yet. Result!)