I put the Akasa 12cm fan in the side of my case by first drilling holes successively larger until I could put the jigsaw in.
I'd marked out a maximal and minimal pair of concentric holes (I'm not interested in perfection) and so got down to it.
Pieces of advice:
1. Make sure you mask off the case. I hadn't realised that the actual jigsaw would scuff/scratch the case under it's entire body. (Dumb, I know). Not that this matters on my shit case hidden in the dark.
2. Fix the case to a rigid object before commencing any cutting. The whole case (or side panel) vibrates and moves around like nobody's business; as do your arms and your eyeballs.
A combination of the above factors meant that I didn't cut the hole in completely the correct shape (its a bit too big on the lower left hand quadrant for a length of about 20mm and peaks up to 4mm of extra hole, in a tangential direction).
Still the motherboard is cooler, the case looks cooler (thanks to the 4 funky lights in the fan, and the Biochem warning grill).
But if you want to do it properly, don't cut corners like I did.
I can honestly say that I could never cut an accurate window in a case.
Originally published on 16:36 Tuesday 06 April 2004
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Friday, March 19, 2004
Overclocking 2
So I got a fairly decent couple of fans: an Akasa 80mm fan for the front mobo side (blows on the disks) and an Enermax 92mm for the back. I also put some Coolermaster RAM heatsinks on one side of my 512MB DIMM.
The result? I can safely take my 1733MHz XP2100+ up to 1898MHz (equivalent to a hypothetical Athlon XP2325+). Or 1% more than before!
This bodes fairly well, as it means I can put an XP2600+ in, and run it as an XP2873+ (nearly XP2900+) which is pretty sweet.
Motherboard temperatures are down to 30C (from 43C) and the CPU is cruising at 46C (down from 52C). Pretty sweet. I've a 12cm Akasa fan to put somewhere, but will need to ensure I don't screw the airflow up. I reckon with branded memory (CAS2) I should be able to squeeze even more out.
I did get the machine to run for a while at 1911MHz (XP2342+) but then it went a bit haywire :-( Oh well!
The result? I can safely take my 1733MHz XP2100+ up to 1898MHz (equivalent to a hypothetical Athlon XP2325+). Or 1% more than before!
This bodes fairly well, as it means I can put an XP2600+ in, and run it as an XP2873+ (nearly XP2900+) which is pretty sweet.
Motherboard temperatures are down to 30C (from 43C) and the CPU is cruising at 46C (down from 52C). Pretty sweet. I've a 12cm Akasa fan to put somewhere, but will need to ensure I don't screw the airflow up. I reckon with branded memory (CAS2) I should be able to squeeze even more out.
I did get the machine to run for a while at 1911MHz (XP2342+) but then it went a bit haywire :-( Oh well!
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
LNX-BBC (10:52 Wednesday 10 March 2004)
LNX-BBC rocks. I fixed tom (my main machine last night with this). In the end I didn't really need X or networking (but they worked) as I managed to back up all my important data to a spare XFS partition (yes it can read/write to XFS) on a spare disk.
Installed Mandrake 10.0 community (using XFS as per usual) and got back my old home directory etc. Fantastic.
Installed Mandrake 10.0 community (using XFS as per usual) and got back my old home directory etc. Fantastic.
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Mandrake 10.0 Community
Upgrading the laptop and my work desktop went pretty smoothly. (Especially on the desktop, where I mounted the 10.0 Community disks on loopback and conned urpmi to look at them there).
My i810 based laptop (Dell Inspiron 2500) is still a bit screwed. For some reason networking is barfed. You can just about get it working but without a default route. Useful. ;-) Sound is as broken as it always has been and the installer flickers like a broken telly. No graphical boot (is that because there's no framebuffer?) Can't get my prism54 card to work either. To be expected really.
Ballsed up my main machine last night. Will fix tonight (using a rescue disk).
Originally published on 13:45 Tuesday 09 March 2004
My i810 based laptop (Dell Inspiron 2500) is still a bit screwed. For some reason networking is barfed. You can just about get it working but without a default route. Useful. ;-) Sound is as broken as it always has been and the installer flickers like a broken telly. No graphical boot (is that because there's no framebuffer?) Can't get my prism54 card to work either. To be expected really.
Ballsed up my main machine last night. Will fix tonight (using a rescue disk).
Originally published on 13:45 Tuesday 09 March 2004
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
Mandrake 10.0 RC1 and i810
OK, I re-installed my trusty Dell Inspiron 2500 with Mandrake last night. Not pretty.
The installer flickers and jumps (but I can live with that) and to be fair there are known issues with MDK 10 on i810.
The worst part was X. I seem to have to need to modprobe intel-agp (or after googling you can see on the cooker list that you should add intel-agp to /etc/modprobe.preload) before I can start X.
Next steps are get rid of the KDE login crud (done: vi /etc/sysconfig/desktop) and try and get my prism54 card working once more.
Oh, and why is grub so ugly on MDK? We want splash screens!
Worst of all: where are all the packages? It seems to have ignored my package selection at install time. C'est la vie. Update: No, they are there, I just needed to rebuild my menus. (04 March 2004).
The installer flickers and jumps (but I can live with that) and to be fair there are known issues with MDK 10 on i810.
The worst part was X. I seem to have to need to modprobe intel-agp (or after googling you can see on the cooker list that you should add intel-agp to /etc/modprobe.preload) before I can start X.
Next steps are get rid of the KDE login crud (done: vi /etc/sysconfig/desktop) and try and get my prism54 card working once more.
Oh, and why is grub so ugly on MDK? We want splash screens!
Worst of all: where are all the packages? It seems to have ignored my package selection at install time. C'est la vie. Update: No, they are there, I just needed to rebuild my menus. (04 March 2004).
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Mandrake 10.0 RC1
I installed Mandrake 10.0 RC1 for the first time last week on my work desktop. This is almost heresy for me as I've been pretty much a Red Hat user/advocate/defender/apologist for about 7 years.
My first experience of Mandrake was either 5.1 or 5.2 in 1998 around my friend Beanz' house. Back then it seemed (or was) Red Hat Linux with just newer RPMs (importantly, newer Enlightenment and Perl from what I recall). Nothing to see here.
In 2001 when my friend Simon Windsor and I got identical laptops, I installed Red Hat 7.1 and he installed Mandrake 7.2 or 8.0 (I forget which).
Mandrake at that point had rpmdrake (I think) - which was very much like SGI Irix's swmgr (software manager). Red Hat had, er, f*ck all. Even now with RHEL 3 and FC 1 redhat-config-packages is a coarse, hack (I love cycling 5 times through a set of 3 disks...).
The install is pretty slick, but you to wonder at the duplication of effort between the perl-based Mandrake install and RH's Anaconda.
Which leads me to my next point: why in the name of all that is holy is there so much duplication of effort. Dudes (and I mean Red Hat, Mandrake and others (YDL, even Debian)): stop writing different tools to do identical jobs. RH have a large number of GPL GUI programs to configure everything, as apparently does Mandrake. e.g userdrake vs. redhat-config-users : they're f*cking identical!!!! Yet completely separate implementations... This is insane.
Cons of Mandrake: only one really, and it's not a Mandrake problem, it's a GNOME/whatever problem. Please, oh please, would all apps have a similar look and feel for their icons. Red Hat have done this themselves through Blue Curve. The rest of the GNOME world needs to catch up. Oh, and no GNOME 2.5 (because it isn't quite ready) ;-)
Pros of Mandrake:
1. Galaxy theme is nice.
2. Install was a piece of cake (even easier than Red Hat? Is that possible?).
3. Uses the Frame Buffer. Something Red Hat either fails to do, or they can't be arsed to do.
4. Gnome menu is sane, unlike Red Hat's where it is too tall and logically similar ideas are split across several menus.
5. *drake commands are pretty nice
6. Nicer default fonts.
Basically, today I'd probably recommend Mandrake over Fedora Core to a desktop user, which is something of turnaround for me.
Originally published on 15:46 Tuesday 02 March 2004
My first experience of Mandrake was either 5.1 or 5.2 in 1998 around my friend Beanz' house. Back then it seemed (or was) Red Hat Linux with just newer RPMs (importantly, newer Enlightenment and Perl from what I recall). Nothing to see here.
In 2001 when my friend Simon Windsor and I got identical laptops, I installed Red Hat 7.1 and he installed Mandrake 7.2 or 8.0 (I forget which).
Mandrake at that point had rpmdrake (I think) - which was very much like SGI Irix's swmgr (software manager). Red Hat had, er, f*ck all. Even now with RHEL 3 and FC 1 redhat-config-packages is a coarse, hack (I love cycling 5 times through a set of 3 disks...).
The install is pretty slick, but you to wonder at the duplication of effort between the perl-based Mandrake install and RH's Anaconda.
Which leads me to my next point: why in the name of all that is holy is there so much duplication of effort. Dudes (and I mean Red Hat, Mandrake and others (YDL, even Debian)): stop writing different tools to do identical jobs. RH have a large number of GPL GUI programs to configure everything, as apparently does Mandrake. e.g userdrake vs. redhat-config-users : they're f*cking identical!!!! Yet completely separate implementations... This is insane.
Cons of Mandrake: only one really, and it's not a Mandrake problem, it's a GNOME/whatever problem. Please, oh please, would all apps have a similar look and feel for their icons. Red Hat have done this themselves through Blue Curve. The rest of the GNOME world needs to catch up. Oh, and no GNOME 2.5 (because it isn't quite ready) ;-)
Pros of Mandrake:
1. Galaxy theme is nice.
2. Install was a piece of cake (even easier than Red Hat? Is that possible?).
3. Uses the Frame Buffer. Something Red Hat either fails to do, or they can't be arsed to do.
4. Gnome menu is sane, unlike Red Hat's where it is too tall and logically similar ideas are split across several menus.
5. *drake commands are pretty nice
6. Nicer default fonts.
Basically, today I'd probably recommend Mandrake over Fedora Core to a desktop user, which is something of turnaround for me.
Originally published on 15:46 Tuesday 02 March 2004
Monday, February 23, 2004
Hi-fi stupidity or is it?
Visited Sound and Vision (which I still refer to as "The Hi-Fi Show") on Friday.
Along with the usual array of lovely stuff, I was most impressed by something I didn't believe in: Mains cables. True Colours Industries demoed the difference between standard mains cable and their own "Constrictor" mains cable. The audible difference was astounding: tighter bass, wider soundstage, clearer, "more beatiful" treble. I had to buy one (even though I couldn't really afford it)! So I bought the 6-way block, and the results at home were even better.
The Velvet Underground were clearer and easier to follow. Norah Jones was more musical and, again, clearer. Richard H Kirk and the Aphex Twin were more taught and, yet again, clearer.
It's like a veil has been lifted or I'd cleaned my ears out. It's like a complete hardware upgrade. And yet, I'm scientifically skeptical that these things work!
Orginally published on 11:37 Monday 23 February 2004
Along with the usual array of lovely stuff, I was most impressed by something I didn't believe in: Mains cables. True Colours Industries demoed the difference between standard mains cable and their own "Constrictor" mains cable. The audible difference was astounding: tighter bass, wider soundstage, clearer, "more beatiful" treble. I had to buy one (even though I couldn't really afford it)! So I bought the 6-way block, and the results at home were even better.
The Velvet Underground were clearer and easier to follow. Norah Jones was more musical and, again, clearer. Richard H Kirk and the Aphex Twin were more taught and, yet again, clearer.
It's like a veil has been lifted or I'd cleaned my ears out. It's like a complete hardware upgrade. And yet, I'm scientifically skeptical that these things work!
Orginally published on 11:37 Monday 23 February 2004
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Overclocked at last
Finally got around to overclocking my venerable XP2100+ which natively runs at 1733MHz. At a whopping (OK, not that whopping) 1884MHz that's a massive (OK not that massive) 9% increase. The same as a theoretical XP2289+ (or nearly an XP2300+).
Not the greatest increase in the world, but noticable. The memory bus still runs at 4:5 so that's 181.25MHz = 362.5MHz DDR (vs. 333MHz standard).
Nice.
Thanks to Coolermaster, there's no noticable increase in temperature or noise. Wow.
But then 9% isn't much, is it?
Originally published on 22:57 Wednesday 18 February 2004
Not the greatest increase in the world, but noticable. The memory bus still runs at 4:5 so that's 181.25MHz = 362.5MHz DDR (vs. 333MHz standard).
Nice.
Thanks to Coolermaster, there's no noticable increase in temperature or noise. Wow.
But then 9% isn't much, is it?
Originally published on 22:57 Wednesday 18 February 2004
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Hauppauge Win Nova T
Now I don't know whose fault this is, Hauppauge's, MSFT's or what, but I am sick the back teeth of my Win Nova T card. It just doesn't fucking work in any way shape or form.
I can scan for channels and it shows that I am receiving all the channels (at 100% level - I'm almost within line-of-sight and 10km to the transmitter).I receive the EPG fine. I even get the Digital Teletext for BBC Parliament.
However, I receive/display no picture and no sound. Which makes it fucking useless.
If you are intending on buying one of these cards for use under Win XP, I can only recommend that you do not as the drivers are clearly shite.
Of course I really want to use it under Linux, but the instructions and (command-line) interface are fucking awful. I guess I'll have to try though as trying to get hardware working under windows is like hitting your head against a wall that you can't see.
I can scan for channels and it shows that I am receiving all the channels (at 100% level - I'm almost within line-of-sight and 10km to the transmitter).I receive the EPG fine. I even get the Digital Teletext for BBC Parliament.
However, I receive/display no picture and no sound. Which makes it fucking useless.
If you are intending on buying one of these cards for use under Win XP, I can only recommend that you do not as the drivers are clearly shite.
Of course I really want to use it under Linux, but the instructions and (command-line) interface are fucking awful. I guess I'll have to try though as trying to get hardware working under windows is like hitting your head against a wall that you can't see.
Prism54.org
Tried the latest CVS snapshot from Prism54.org last night with my Netgear WG511 card.
Perfect. No moans, no quibbles, just brilliant. I can now surf, scp ISO images, you name it, wirelessly around the home.
Perfect. No moans, no quibbles, just brilliant. I can now surf, scp ISO images, you name it, wirelessly around the home.
Monday, January 26, 2004
2.6 noticable improvement
Here's a quick noticable improvement I've noticed in Kernel 2.6 over previous versions.
If someone FTPs ISO images off my (cheap, IDE-based) desktop machine, then it still remains usable and responsive. Nice.
If someone FTPs ISO images off my (cheap, IDE-based) desktop machine, then it still remains usable and responsive. Nice.
Friday, January 23, 2004
SGI XFS in Fedora Core 2 (woo-hoo!)
I read that Fedora Core 2 will have XFS in it out of the box! At last!
ext3 always feels a little clunky (although I've no evidence for this) compared with XFS. I've never tried JFS and Hans Reiser, although a genius, is an arse. I'll stick with what I know.
Originally published on 12:35 Friday 23 January 2004
ext3 always feels a little clunky (although I've no evidence for this) compared with XFS. I've never tried JFS and Hans Reiser, although a genius, is an arse. I'll stick with what I know.
Originally published on 12:35 Friday 23 January 2004
Friday, December 12, 2003
An Indy and Debian. Part 2
After re-partitioning (to bring / up to 460MB) and re-installing Debian 3.0r1 (woody) I must say that I'm reasonably impressed. Well, it works and this isn't the most common hardware around.
However - I want eye-candy and I want it now! :-)
Gnome 1.4 - I mean; for f*ck's sake. Wasn't that released 3 years ago or more?
So - how to get a newer Gnome. Well I thought I'd try Sarge which I suppose most people would view as being a beta of 3.1.
Nope. libc6_2.3.2.ds1-10_mips.deb won't install. A quick google later and I find out that I need a newer kernel from here. This is one of the trials of being on an obscure platform.
Back up and running again and I retry: When all's said and done apt-get dist-upgrade is seriously cool.
If I get this mips one all working, then my next project is mipsel on a Cobalt Qube 2.
However - I want eye-candy and I want it now! :-)
Gnome 1.4 - I mean; for f*ck's sake. Wasn't that released 3 years ago or more?
So - how to get a newer Gnome. Well I thought I'd try Sarge which I suppose most people would view as being a beta of 3.1.
Nope. libc6_2.3.2.ds1-10_mips.deb won't install. A quick google later and I find out that I need a newer kernel from here. This is one of the trials of being on an obscure platform.
Back up and running again and I retry: When all's said and done apt-get dist-upgrade is seriously cool.
If I get this mips one all working, then my next project is mipsel on a Cobalt Qube 2.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Wireless success!
Fuelled by alcohol, I finally got my wireless network card (Netgear WG511) to work last night.
Mainly thanks to this simple to follow set of instructions.
I love Linux and I love Linux users!
Mainly thanks to this simple to follow set of instructions.
I love Linux and I love Linux users!
An Indy and Debian
I bought a dream-machine on ebay: an SGI Indy R5000. OK so realistically, it's a 10th as powerful as my Athlon XP at home in virtually every way, but you know. It's seriously cool.
IRIX wasn't totally there any more (/usr was NFS mounted...) so I decided to install Debian. After all "everyone" says how great it is and stuff. Especially "apt" and how great Debian is at dependencies.
This is complete bollocks.
I'll skip over the Red Hat 4.x installer and less-than-useful X configuration tools (I did it by hand in the end). Everyone knows about Debian's installer and that it needs changing (but only if you're not as 133t as all Debian users :-). Anaconda rocks - no more whining Debian drones, just do it.
So apt is all singing all dancing is it? Well Debian had it before Red Hat had up2date (and apt :-). Dependencies never a problem? (Not that they have been on Red Hat since 7.2 but Debian bores can't cope with the truth).
Well let me tell you this: it is very easy to completely F*ck over a Debian box. Why? Because apt doesn't check disk space for you before the whole install takes place and so bombs out half way through with an inconsistent set of libraries.
Debian sucks. I'll probably try to re-install it (something I've NEVER had to do on any version of Unix/Linux).
IRIX wasn't totally there any more (/usr was NFS mounted...) so I decided to install Debian. After all "everyone" says how great it is and stuff. Especially "apt" and how great Debian is at dependencies.
This is complete bollocks.
I'll skip over the Red Hat 4.x installer and less-than-useful X configuration tools (I did it by hand in the end). Everyone knows about Debian's installer and that it needs changing (but only if you're not as 133t as all Debian users :-). Anaconda rocks - no more whining Debian drones, just do it.
So apt is all singing all dancing is it? Well Debian had it before Red Hat had up2date (and apt :-). Dependencies never a problem? (Not that they have been on Red Hat since 7.2 but Debian bores can't cope with the truth).
Well let me tell you this: it is very easy to completely F*ck over a Debian box. Why? Because apt doesn't check disk space for you before the whole install takes place and so bombs out half way through with an inconsistent set of libraries.
Debian sucks. I'll probably try to re-install it (something I've NEVER had to do on any version of Unix/Linux).
Friday, November 21, 2003
Check Point Secure Platform
Well, out RHL migration is going well and one of the surprise successes has been installing Check Point Secure Platform. This is a stripped-down recompiled and hardened Red Hat (I think) OS designed specifically for running Check Point products on. It installs in under 10 minutes (including configuring by our Network & Security Administrator) and rocks. Try it if you're a Check Point site - it's pretty fantastic.
Thursday, November 13, 2003
Fedora Core 1 and RHEL ES 3
Ugraded both of my home machines to Fedora Core without a hitch. Nice, real nice.
Also installed our first two RHEL ES 3 boxen at work. Slick. OK it would really, really have been nice for Red Hat to have offered an upgrade path from RHL 7.x to RHEL 3, but the lazy bastards didn't do so. C'est la vie.
Also installed our first two RHEL ES 3 boxen at work. Slick. OK it would really, really have been nice for Red Hat to have offered an upgrade path from RHL 7.x to RHEL 3, but the lazy bastards didn't do so. C'est la vie.
Monday, November 10, 2003
Fedora Core 1
Red Hat have released Fedora Core 1 which, lets face it, is a really sh*t name but one I guess we're stuck with.
So what's it like? Pretty tasty. OK, so I spoiled my surprise by using the betas, but I am impressed. Seriously. This is one nicely polished desktop operating environment. This is as good as Ximian Desktop 2 and far superior to XP.
Another thing: no longer will I have users complaining that we've run out of RHN licences thanks to the yum and apt support in up2date. Nice one Red Hat, nice one.
Side note: the Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow) CDs burned fine under Nero5, but RHEL ES 3 CDs fail big time. Weird.
Originally puiblished on 15:56 Monday 10 November 2003
So what's it like? Pretty tasty. OK, so I spoiled my surprise by using the betas, but I am impressed. Seriously. This is one nicely polished desktop operating environment. This is as good as Ximian Desktop 2 and far superior to XP.
Another thing: no longer will I have users complaining that we've run out of RHN licences thanks to the yum and apt support in up2date. Nice one Red Hat, nice one.
Side note: the Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow) CDs burned fine under Nero5, but RHEL ES 3 CDs fail big time. Weird.
Originally puiblished on 15:56 Monday 10 November 2003
Checkpoint training
Long time no write.
So the week before last I went on a "Check Point FW 1 NG FP4 with Application Intelligence" (catchy name guys!) training course (Management II). This was the first time I've ever been on a formal technical training course, and my opinion is mixed.
The instructor seemed to spend the same amount of time explaining the bleeding obvious as she did explaining/glossing over more advanced concepts. While she certainly knew her stuff, if asked a question that was just outside of the sylabus then she just didn't know.
I assume she had some practical experience, but probably only in several fixed scenarios. The real world was not allowed to be mixed dangerously with static knowledge set.
On another note, how long will it be before an open source firewall has a GUI as usable as FW1's? When that happens (2-5 years?) then I think we'll see Check Point start to go the way of proprietary UNIXen.
Originally published on 14:34 Monday 10 November 2003
So the week before last I went on a "Check Point FW 1 NG FP4 with Application Intelligence" (catchy name guys!) training course (Management II). This was the first time I've ever been on a formal technical training course, and my opinion is mixed.
The instructor seemed to spend the same amount of time explaining the bleeding obvious as she did explaining/glossing over more advanced concepts. While she certainly knew her stuff, if asked a question that was just outside of the sylabus then she just didn't know.
I assume she had some practical experience, but probably only in several fixed scenarios. The real world was not allowed to be mixed dangerously with static knowledge set.
On another note, how long will it be before an open source firewall has a GUI as usable as FW1's? When that happens (2-5 years?) then I think we'll see Check Point start to go the way of proprietary UNIXen.
Originally published on 14:34 Monday 10 November 2003
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