04.13.10
Posted in Computer Techmology at 10:00 UTC by Richard
This isn’t a big deal at all, but I have a three year old eVGA 7600GT video card that just died a couple nights ago. It appears to have been due to a failure of all six FZ73 1500 6.3V capacitors that lived on the board, after they failed, the voltage regulator failed. This of course means you get the magic smoke and the hardware stops working. I really wish these chinese capacitor vendors would get their shit together, capacitors are something that should last for years.
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04.08.08
Posted in Computer Techmology at 08:30 UTC by Richard
The problem: within vmware you may experience an issue booting your virtual machine off of a gparted iso (the reason you would want to do this is to resize your partition) and you wind up with a black screen after it attempts to mount a scsi device for 20 minutes or so.
The fix: open up the .vmx file in a text editor and find the line that says ‘scsi0.present = “TRUE”‘ and change “TRUE” to “FALSE”.
This solved my problem and vmware booted right up and I was able to resize the partition. I found the fix here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=685702
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12.27.06
Posted in Computer Techmology at 08:57 UTC by Richard
So I’m closing in on my target date of an upgrade to my gaming box, sometime in January, which of course means an upgrade to my linux box. Generally what I’ve done in the past several years is I upgrade my gaming box and move the discarded parts to my linux box. Seeing that I don’t game in Linux at all, newest of the new hardware is never needed. As far as hardware, I know mostly what I’m going to get, check it out:
- Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150
- PNY VCG88GTSXPB GeForce 8800GTS 640MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16
- FSP Group (Fortron Source) AX400-PN
- CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
- GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 Socket T Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Conroe 2.13GHz
- Scythe SCNJ-1100P 120mm CPU Cooling Fan
The Raptor will be going directly to the linux box since I do more disk intensive stuff there, the rest to the gaming box. My big problem is that this is an expensive upgrade. That video card is kinda pricey… so, anyone need a 7800GTX? Also, since I’ll be moving my Athlon 64 X2 3800+ to linux, I can finally mess around with a 64-bit distro. Being a Slackware guy, I immediately think of Slamd64. Unfortunately, my favorite add on, Dropline Gnome does not have a 64-bit version and Slackware has no gnome applications. UGH! I have about a month to figure out what to do, but there are some unofficial DLG64 packages (as it is becoming to be known) out there and I can probably work out the rest of the details, possibly having to compile some of the apps myself if I have to.
Oh right, sorry about four months of no updates, my bad.
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06.06.06
Posted in Computer Techmology at 07:56 UTC by Richard
Ubuntu 6.06 was released just a few days ago and I just got a chance to upgrade to in on my laptop yesterday (my Fujitsu 7010). My initial reaction is “that’s nice” and “I like that change.” HOWEVER, my 1280×768 default resolution stopped working after I rebooted. There was a nice script I found about a year and a half back when I bought it which was a hack, but it allowed the native resolution to work. I went back to that post and noticed that there was a debian package released last august that does the same thing, install that, reboot and now it’s working again. Joy! Another post about the soekris soon…
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06.04.06
Posted in Computer Techmology at 02:43 UTC by Richard
It hasn’t arrived yet. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111oneonetwo
oh, and watch this, it’s better than cheese: http://drecosby.ytmnd.com/ (and cheese is really good)
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05.28.06
Posted in Computer Techmology at 04:26 UTC by Richard
Right now, I’m about to pull the trigger and buy a new router. It’s actually a tiny computer that is generally used as a router, though it can do many other things, and it is called the Soekris. My friend that runs truck-web.us here on this linode has had one for quite awhile and can’t say anything but good things about it. It would be replacing my aging FreeBSD router that is run on a very old Compaq desktop with a Pentium75 and 48MB of RAM which has seen continual use for the last four years. I can’t wait to play with it!
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