Last year just before Xmas/New Year I bought a cheap Novatech V13 small notebook. Though Novatech say it's made in the UK, it's quite clear that it's actually a Clevo W83T made in China.
Installing Debian on it was interesting, it has no optical disk, so I had to do the install off a USB device or PXE boot over the network. It was happy to boot off the network, but alas the Debian stable kernel didn't have the JMC250 driver in, so the install couldn't proceed. It was happy to boot from an image on a USB hard disk, and after copying a kernel over from Debian testing, I even had a functioning network.
I don't have WiFi at home, my router predates cheap WiFi, and as wires are cheaper, faster and more secure than WiFi I've not bothered to buy a WiFi access point. The Clevo W83T has a fairly new Realtek 8191SE WiFi chip-set. While Realtek provide a driver for Linux, it only went into the 2.6.33 kernel, which isn't yet available in Debian testing.
Today I downloaded the Realtek driver direct (rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0017.0507.2010), built it and loaded into the 2.6.32 kernel I'm running at the moment. Press the right button on the keyboard to activate the WiFi chip-set and the KDE Network Manager now says I have an active WiFi and would I like to join a local network.
Woot!
A few days ago I bought a cheap ATI Radeon AGP graphics card to try and extend the life of my desktop system.
The first bug I encountered was that the OpenGL compositing in KDE4
wasn't stable. I added some extra bits to the xorg.conf
config file that is supposed to help (it didn't seem to on it's own)
and I told KDE4's kwin that it wasn't to do a compositing
compatibility test, it should just do it. With that all in place,
OpenGL worked and everything was fine and dandy.
Yesterday I upgraded my Debian "squeeze" system and AMD/ATI's fglrx
driver was upgraded to version 10-6-1 from 10-5-1. When I restarted
X it crashed horribly. Apparently this is a known bug in Xorg and
you just need to make sure you have BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
(or whatever) set correctly in your xorg.conf file.
Today I diligently updated my xorg.conf file and restarted
X and it worked. However now all KDE4 windows are blank and I can't use
them, so I've gone back to the open-source radeonhd driver until I
can figure out what I need to tweak next to fix it.
Not that I'm complaining, I am running Debian testing and I am playing with fire in using the AMD/ATI official drivers, which are noted for the unreliability...
Our desktop systems use generic Nvidia FX5200 AGP graphics cards. Since I upgraded my desktop to KDE4 I've found that the old FX card isn't really up to the job and runs out of steam quite a bit.
I tried to scrounge a newer card from my LUG but there were none to have, so I broke down and bought a newer AGP card. As AGP is obsolete I didn't have much choice, however I found a cheap enough AMD/ATI powered Sapphire HD3450 card.
After fiddling with X.org to get the right driver loaded, and the Nvidia drivers removed KDE4 started with fancy OpenGL compositing running VERY much quicker. Alas there are some stability problems, but nothing that can't be fixed, I hope!
My dead PC is alive again. DNUK sent out a replacement PSU by currier, and after a few hours of cursing it was all up and running. Nylon rip ties can be a pain to remove without hurting the cables they are holding together. I used Velcro when I put it back together. Yesterday I posted the old PSU back to DNUK as I'm happy that my PC is okay.
All companies have problems, it's all well and good to have reliable kit but how you deal with failure also make one hell of a difference. I have had problems with all three PCs I bought from DNUK: two Iiyama TFT LCD screens had temporary image persistence problems and one PSU has died. However they swapped out the defective parts in all occasions without a problem and with minimal downtime.
This morning my DNUK home server was switched off. I switched it back on, the POST came up and before GRUB had a chance to start it powered off again. I tried again and on the second time GRUB came up, but again it powered down on it's own. As this box is my DNS, DHCP, NTP, WWW, IMAP and backup box this is not so good.
I've sent an email to DNUK, the box is still under warranty, so we'll see what happens...
UPDATE: DNUK got back to my email within an hour, and have dispatched a replacement PSU to see if that fixes the box, otherwise they will take it back and replace bits until it starts to work again. Seeing as I'm very busy at the moment and I'm in a rush this is an acceptable start.
Nearly a decade ago, when I lived in the US, I bought a nylon webbing belt made by Bison Designs. I liked it so much that I bought two more. I used them daily for over 6 years and then the Polyoxymethylene (aka Delrin) buckle on one them died and then to my horror I broke an other one by standing on it.
I ordered replacements from Bison and a few weeks later they turned up in the post, via a proxy as they don't sell outside the US. I liked the replacement though the drape and design on the original belts was better.
After two years of use the buckle on one of the new belts died. This time I wasn't happy, two years isn't very long, a fraction of the time my originals had lasted so I emailed Bison Designs to complain. A nice lady replied and said I should just pop all the broken belts in the post and they'd fix them all. When they say a life time warranty, then really mean it!
Today my belts turned up in the post, all as good as new!
At the start of the is week my Dell Optiplex PC at work died. Well it actually refused to boot, Windows XP got so far but no further. I've been given a new PC to work with instead.
On one hand it's nice to have a new PC, it's marginally faster and the new keyboard is much nicer, on the other I've lost two days to setting it back up again to be useful. The new PC is on the companies new build, so even though I'm still local admin there are things I can't do on this PC that I use to be able to do on the old one.
It's a shame I can't have Linux and I'm forced to have an obsolete Windows system but nothing is perfect...
Flash Gordon Savour of the World wants us to borrow and spend our way out of the debt created problems that the UK is currently in. I've done my best to avoid spending, waiting for the much predicted "deflation" to kick in and send prices into a downward spiral to oblivion - so far I've not noticed only inflation in the things that matter and some mild disflation in tat and other non-essentials.
My antique Dell notebook really is reaching the end of it's useful life, 10 years is good going for a Dell. I don't need a full sized notebook really - I never did in the first place, but a netbook may come in handy. The Acer One is a nice device and Amazon are flogging them for £170, which isn't bad - it's better than the £225 that CeX are selling second hand units for in town.
So far I don't see much discounting in the stuff I want, just trivial tat that people could easily live without. I'll probably hold on as long as I can, no point in throwing money away if there is a real bargain to be had..!
Yesterday we spent a good 2 hours standing in the car park at work as the building was evacuated because of "chemical incident" in the server room. Our clapped out infrastructure struck again, an UPS failed in a fairly destructive way - the battery exploded!
Small/cheap notebooks are all the range since the Asus Eee PC-701 launched. Interestingly many of them come with Linux installed instead of the more typical Microsoft Windows. My current Dell Inspiron is showing it's age, it's way to slow and the case is breaking in quite a few places. I don't use or need a notebook much so I've been unwilling to buy a new full price notebook, even a cheap £300 Dell Inspiron.
The initial Asus created quite a stir and there are now several members of the Eee family and several alternatives from their competitors. The Acer Aspire One looks rather nice and works pretty much out of the box with Debian. Maybe I'll buy one, or then again perhaps I'll not...
This morning the SCSI sub-system on my development server Turing gave up. I switched him off took his disks out and put them in a spare chassis and rebooted him. All told he was off-line for about 5 minutes. It took an hour or so to rebuild the disk mirror and now it's all okay.
I now hope this box will last a little longer and eventually we will be able to migrate my Linux systems off their current antique hardware platforms onto a more modern VMware virtual platform.
On Monday morning both SCSI disks on my test system had died. We left the machine to cool and it successfully restarted later on. This morning one of disks again died, so I swapped it with one of my only two remaining spares. So far both disks are still running but I am expecting the older of the two disks to fail at some point this week. It's also possible that the SCSI sub-system it's self will fail, it's been a common failure on these Compaq DL servers.
I now have a new stack of salvaged disks from other decommissioned servers in my desk for when the next drive fails. Eventually these machines will be pensioned off and replaced with virtual systems within our VMWare solution but for the mean time they are real machines with real failing hardware.
I've replaced my home server Herisson with Lapin. Pretty much everything about the new server is an order of magnitude faster or larger, the disk is two orders of magnitude greater (though in practice less with mirroring enabled).
I now have Lapin partitioned up into the default system "Bleu" and several virtual machines "Noir" and "Rouge" for specific uses. The remote access works and I'm just waiting for Xen to trickle into Debian Lenny then I'll have KQemu, VirtualBox and Xen all at my disposal.
Today I finally copied the last files off Herisson and then splatted the disks by installing a fresh copy of Debian on top with a LVM2 layout that was quite different from what was their originally. Shortly thereafter he went off to a new home, where I hope it will prove as useful as it has here.
Herisson: Gone but not forgotten.
Today I wiped my new box and started the procedure to install it
to replace my old home server. The Debian "Lenny" β DVD I
downloaded and burnt to DVD didn't work, it got stuck in the
partitioning stage, so I had to give up on that and fall back
to an older "Etch" DVD. The "Etch" disk worked okay and once
I'd got the basics on, I did a quick
aptitude dist-upgrade and Lenny was running okay.
For most of the afternoon I've been copying files from my desktop system onto the new server and files from the old server to the new one. NFS over a 1Gig network just isn't fast enough anymore, how people manage with WiFi I'll never know...
Tomorrow I'll get most of the key services running and by the time the we have to move house I'll have decommissioned and given away my old home server.
At long last my new box has arrived. Following my standard naming convention, it's going to be Lapin-Bleu. Lapin will be replacing Herisson, a three year old box that work were junking. Lapin is in most ways an order of magnitude more powerful than Herisson, except disk space where it's a two orders of magnitude improvement.
There are only three down-sides of the transition, the new box will draw more power, could make more noise and I'll have to arse about to make the transition. I've yet to double check but when I booted the new box for the first time, it was actually quite quiet, so it may be only the increase in power demand that is my long term problem.
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I am not a PC,
I am a free man!
