In The Jungle: Running Linux for August

So what's happened since this little experiment started? Not much. Still plugging along. Well...kinda. There's lots going on in Linux-land, so let's take a peek at what's happened for the month:

The Desktop Experience
Replaced the sucky FX5200 AGP with a Radeon 9600SE, and things got faster...until the Radeon suffered a stroke and started to "snow" during heavy drawing. Swapped for an older (and much more stable) Radeon 9100, but as this machine dual-boots to accomodate the wife, Windows 7 has trouble with it. Specifically, during shutdown it bluescreens. Wouldn't have anything to do with those Windows XP drivers I fed it, right? ;-)

So the FX5200 is back in. The proprietary Nvidia driver is reloaded. And life is back to the way it was for both boot partitions.

Recycled Server
Under consideration is the family server. The initial build was made with recycled discards from work (with approval from the boss, of course) along with many spares I had already. So here's what we're looking at:

• Antec Sonata III "Quiet" Case, 380W PS
• Tyan 230T Mobo (w/thermal and fan sensors)
  
• Twin Pentium III "Tualatin Cores" @ 1.266 Ghz (512Mb L2 Cache)
• 512Mb PC133 ECC RAM
  
• mirrored 80Gb PATA drives
• Debian 5 (sans desktop)
  

The initial build has been completed (many thanks to Jason for the 2nd drive!), but there are some outstanding problems. The twin fans are whiny-loud, there is a faint smell of burnt something on warm days, and finding someplace to put it in the house where you don't hear whiny-loud and smell burnt something while connecting to Internet access is also an issue. And then there's cramming everything into 80Gb, which for us isn't too bad (we don't do digital video) but it's still a concern because there's no backup...

The first concern is the burnt smell. The case has a 120mm back fan, and the smell seems stronger there than at the power supply. I've eyeballed just about all of the large caps on the mobo but none look swollen to my untrained eye, nor are there any signs of a leak.

The whiny fans I can't do too much about without sinking more $$ into it. And right now, given I've popped $50 or so into this old beast, I'm not sure if it's worth it. Some $10 fans would silence this but that's $20 outlay, and this beast is probably worth that in parts.

I haven't come up with a coherent storage strategy that doesn't require a 3rd mass storage device. I have considered, and decided for, the use of LVM, as I'll probably upgrade the drives at some point in the future, and LVM will make that a snap.

Guess lighting this up will have to wait another month. Stay tuned while I try to breathe some life into this Frankenstein of mine...


Palm Pre & Friends
I've downloaded the Palm Pre software development kit for Linux, and have completed the install. No, I don't own a Pre, I just wanted to mess around with it. So far, it's pretty straightforward, although the novacom debacle is hardly what I call friendly. Novacom is needed to transfer data into the device, and it uses some kind of weird protocol to handle this. They should have just looked at a pre-existing protocol, something like SSH maybe, but I digress.

Pros:

• If you can do some basic HTML, you can probably write something.
• If you can do more than HTML, you'll make stuff that's just F@#%ing brilliant.
• You can root it in no time flat. Hell, if you connect with novaterm, you get a root session.

Cons:

• It's not the real thing.
• Questions of how developers will commercialize any programs for it

Of course, the Pre is dying a slow death because the iPhone has more or less sucked all the oxygen out of its vicinity. Too bad - I like devices that I can perform feats of pwnage on and bend them to my (diabolical?) will. The iPhone doesn't have that factor - what you see is what you get, and sometimes, that's just not enough for me. To each, their own...