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!)
Tags: computers:mine, computers:vain, novatech, nvidia No comments