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I'm going to give it all of my loving, its going to take up all of my time

24 December 2006 21:50

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!)

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