In my previous post, I said more on that later. Well, it is later - much later. Sorry to all zero of you who were waiting for more posts. The thing is, I just lost interest. Mrs Bort and I dusted off the bikes and have started cycling again, and we love it. We now think nothing of a quick 24km ride, taking only an hour and a half or so. I also just didn’t have the motivation to put aside some time to type something up. Well now, on this lazy boxing day, I have found the time.

Software issues I had with the new pc.  The main issue was with Intel’s wonderful decision to drop native support for IDE devices in their chipset. Sure, fair enough for hard drives. But considering that in Australia I have a choice of two sata optical DVD writers - one HP, one Plextor - that cost two or three times what an IDE drive costs, it is not good.

 So the motherboard manufacturers have had to put an additional controller on the board to run IDE devices, such as the DVD drive that the operating system is installed from. Something that needs extra drivers so the drive can be seen. Here is where the fun started.

My choice of operating system was to be a flavour of linux - gentoo or ubuntu, because that is what I have experience with. I didn’t want to go with windows, because:

a) I didn’t want to have all the virus, spyware, adware hassles;

b) I don’t support Microsoft’s business practises, and want to move away from using windows;

c) I’m tight; and

d) I didn’t want to plug in a floppy drive to install the jmicron drivers supplied with the board.

First up, I tried gentoo. The standard livecd wouldn’t boot - it doesn’t have the jmicron IDE controller support in the kernel. So a bit of research in the gentoo forums found a cd created by one of the members, with the later kernel. I booted from that and it worked - I was able to go through a fair bit of the install, putting a stage 3 gentoo install on the hard drive. Trouble came when I rebooted - it didn’t boot. It’s a while ago now, I can’t remember whether it got past the grub menu screen or not.

I think I worked for about a day on getting the damn thing up and running, but to no avail.

Back on the net (with the other machine that still worked, thankfully) and I found that the latest ubuntu version (6.10 Edgy) had support for the jmicron controller. Slightly admitting defeat, I downloaded the livecd and booted from it. Lo and behold, it worked! I was able to install ubuntu on the pc in under an hour, compared with the days that would probably be required with getting gentoo up and running (although I was looking forward to seeing how fast it compiled with the core 2 duo).

I have since been running ubuntu for a bit over a month, and I’m quite impressed with both the OS and the machine I’ve built. Temperatures have been pretty reasonable, only getting into the low 50s on a hot day, the hard drives are staying cool as well. The graphics card temperatures have been the highest in the box, getting into the high 60s when the room has hit 30+. Still, I’ve never had a GPU temperature reading on previous machines, so I wouldn’t have a clue how hot the 9700 was getting. Anyway, for a passive cooler that is partially blocked by an IDE cable, the geforce 7300GT is going quite well. I benchmarked Doom 3, and got around 56 frames per second at 1280x1024, medium detail. That’s what I got in windows at 800x600 on the other machine, so I am pretty happy. Anyway, I have barely played it so game performance is a non-issue. The only other gaming was a quick flight in both the demo version of X-plane and the full version of flightgear. Performance was quite good in both, the games ran well, and even the joystick was detected correctly.

In the last day, I have been working on one of the few things that I have to keep using the Windows PC for - updating my PDA, a HP ipaq rz1710. All I use that for is viewing news through avantgo and listening to podcasts and the odd bit of music. Previously, I had tried to get gentoo to see it but without much success. Linux would detect the device but I couldn’t get to any of the files on the device.

However, thanks to this thread I am now able to connect to the device and add and delete files on it through the file browser. I have added my regular podcast links into Rhythmbox, the music player, so I can now piss off using itunes for podcasts as well. The only stumbling block is now getting avantgo to update - I keep getting a DNS error when I try that.

Apart from that, all is going well! Hopefully I will be back with another update before too long.