Proving the Obviously Untrue

Ok, I spoke to soon. I thought video was my only problem.

On Tuesday I planned to work at home, to get a lot of code written for OPUS and found my computer locked. I kept restarting it, kept getting kernel panics. The temperature was fine, there was no abnormal load, I tried a new kernel or four, and apparently got a bit more stability. The graphics problems were worse than ever, and I get fed up and bought an ATI HD2600 Pro, which solved all those problems.

Still the machine kept locking. I eventually began to suspect the memory.

Continue reading "ASUS P5KC Memory / PSU Problems" »

I've had some time to reflect on the OpenIsland conference held in Belfast last Friday, which I was involved in organising and spoke at. We had 170 people registered, and despite dire warning of bad snow storms (5 cm of snow causes Northern Ireland to grind to a halt), which I fear put off many participants, we still managed 110 people showing up at the start.

Sir Reg Empey, local minister turned up to launch Open NI the body which should partner Open Ireland in the Republic. We also had senior guests from the University of Ulster and the newly formed Southern Regional College. This was before our two keynote speakers, Bruce Perens, and Robert O'Dea.

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I upgraded imladris (my personal box) yesterday after a long gap. Most of the process went very smoothly, but there some issues that took me some time to work around. This is really to record what I did to fix some issues for the benefit of myself and any others that have the same problems. I bought an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz CPU (which interestingly is regarded as amd64 in linux distributions, not ia64), an Asus P5KC motherboard, 2 GIG DDR2 RAM and an nvidia GeForce 8500GT. I probably regret the last item since I asked for an ati card but was talked out of it by the sales guy who also uses GNU Linux (but probably doesn't worry about the proprietary drivers). My fear was that the nv free driver for xorg wasn't so hot, and I think that's been borne out.

After an hour or so I powered up the new system, found only one CPU reported on the old stock kernel, so installed the amd64 stock kernel (this is debian lenny, and I'm still running the applications in 32 bit mode), and there we have it, two CPU traces. The machine is operating very nicely, very responsive and undertaking complex jobs with ease, and without flat-lining either CPU. It is probably quieter than my old AMD single core processor, which is rather slower than each core. However, there were some problems with both sound and video.

Continue reading "Imladris Upgrade (nvidia problems)" »