just want to get this started as I hope it will motivate me to finish it, since I have done a LOT of things on my computer since my last post, and obviously I have posted none of it.
So, I got a little impatient about not having my PC functioning, so I I installed Fedora 12 x64 on the rest of my FreeBSD boot drive and I have about 80% of the things on my list done and working. I’ll reference them by numbers here, and you can go read what they were by clicking on “my list” above. I am still hoping to get FreeBSD as my host OS; however everything is working right now with Fedora (except that stupid wireless NIC), although I am still having my “system reached critical temp” error from ACPI, yet the system resource monitor I have running shows a nice pleasant 30C CONSTANT temp. maybe this summer I’ll pickup a liquid CPU cooler… I already have 5 exhaust fans and 2 intake fans, 2 x 240mm exhaust and a 160mm or 180mm intake, I think I have air flow covered. (talked to a friend who is more into the details of technical issues, a network engineer, and he says that an inactive CPU, like when the system shutsdown, can drop 40F in about 7-10 seconds so it might be why I cannot catch it reporting a high temp in the BIOS) The BIOS does not report any temps reaching above 45C ever, so I have no idea why this is happening, I do run widgets reporting the internal temp, but have never seen it change!!!) . most of the time when it shuts there is/has been high CPU/disk IO usage (all 4 cores over 60% sustained, multiple long term large/multiple file movements across drives and/or multiple VMs running). So it could be valid.
I have come up with a couple of things to try to resolve this issue (going with the cheapest first, even if it is not really going to help a CPU issue, it can’t hurt…)
- I could just upgrade some hardware and see if a different BIOS/MB manufacturer makes a difference. I would love a lower watt CPU (or 6 core!), more L2/L3 cache, and USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s, since my current system bottleneck is the SATA 3GB/s HDDs.
- Switch to liquid cooling and installing a new thermal sensor with an external readout.
- buy cute little 5cfm coolling fans to place on my NorthBridge, SouthBridge, and onboard GPU passive cooling fins (cheapest option, not necessarily attacking the actual issue though)
- purchase a pretty new Video card and disable the onboard video (the chip is within an inch or two from the CPU, so there maybe some issue with residual heat from the GPU causing my overheating).
in order from cheapest to most expensive would be 3, 2, 4/1 (really close and might be a tie or within a $20-$30)
My List of things to get working, except this one is for Fedora.
1. VirtualBox is installed, working and I have multiple VMs up and running.
2. Install VMWare Workstation, I have downloaded the newest trial version and it is good for another 3 weeks, but have not gotten around to installing it.
3. Mounting my NTFS drives, all mounted, where I want them, even went through and deleted the Windows OS system folders from all but one.
4. SSH connections, I have started this and was working on it when I decided to start this post, should be done tomorrow.
5. I am posting this from Google Chrome on my Fedora 12 installation right now, so I’d say installed and working. Java shows up in the plugins, although java.com cannot detect it in my browser.
6. Hulu works great in Firefox or Google Chrome, although is a bit spotty when I have VMs running, and the playback is laggy in Chrome… So I am trying to get the Hulu Desktop app running. will make a post after I get some work done on it and let you know how it goes.
7. So far everything is working great, going to try a couple of VM’ed games next week after I get the rest of this done.
8. Firefox is up, running, and is playing hulu; however it does not report Java as installed from the about:plugins page, even though it is and I followed all the steps to link the correct files to the correct places. I believe this is the Firefox 3.6 doesn’t support Java issue though and not an issue on my part.
9. access NTFS drives remotely via ssh and a chrooted account with links to the mounts. After I get my SSH working tomorrow I should be able to test this. I was reading something online I no longer have open and may not have bookmarked that said that I can double mount drives (mount a drive to more than one, specifically 2, locations)
10. convert my NTFS drives to a more suitable linux FS, this again is a last thing item, to be done after everything else is working.
11. convert my drives from MBR to GPT, most likely to be done at the same time as the FS change.
12. GUI package manager for KDE, done, comes with Fedora.
13. eliminate all traces of Gnome from my computer… again, have to be last thing, once all is up and working.
14. build my first kernel, normally done immediately after install, I’ll do it last after EVERYTHING else (including the other things I said I would do last)
15. Wine is installed and works. will try out some things that I have installed in VMs to see about dropping those VMs
16. install older apps, again part of a couple of other items, I will of course be installing older apps on older OS installation I have, and will try them in Wine as stated.
17. X.org port forwarding to Cygwin on a windows machine (laptop) something I might do in a week or two…
18. start regular backups… I’m getting there, I have the drive formated in ext3, I just have not started backing things up.
19. Java, I think it works in Chrome, I was able to see the animated maps on the NOAA website, which most people use to test their Java. not working in Firefox 3.5.9.2
20. Flash, Hulu is working in Firefox and Chrome, so all good here.
21. Yakuake is fully functional and working.
22. Picasa 3.6 (I think) is installed and working great, except I don’t seem to be able to find the facial recognician system.
23. No idea on this one, can not find where I posted what it was, only that it was completed on BSD.
Unfinished items for Fedora: 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 19?
apparently Open Office will not load, for an unknown reason, looking into it at this time.
Ok, so first, sorry I have not posted in a while. First I was out of the continental united states for a couple of weeks in December, then had some pet problems in early January, followed up with breaking the crap out of my leg January 16th. I cracked my Tibia clean through about 3 inches above my ankle and then the tibia split up the bone about 6 inches, followed by cracking my fibula clean through just above the split in my tibia. I have a lovely 8″ metal plate in my leg with 15 screws now. so I do actually have a couple of good reasons for not posting. I just started feeling somewhat better, I got my appetite back this past Saturday and my pain is mostly manageable even though I rarely find a comfortable position to sit/lay. in
Happier news…
Sprint is finally getting an Android phone with the new 1GHz SnapDragon processor by Qualcomm (extra cool it is capable of going up to 1.5 GHz if I remember correctly). The HTC Super-sonic. Hopefully late March, early April!! finally! I’ve been waiting since October…
Next up, back to my lovely PC, most everything seems to be working just fine now, I am running with the default BIOS settings and it works at least; however the PC sits on the BIOS POST image for almost 2 minutes before it actually starts POSTing. Not sure what to do about that, I think I need to wait for the next BIOS update to fix that, but for now… it works.
So, I used a bootable CD with Paragon Defrag on it to Defrag my Windows 7 boot HDD and then used the Fedora 12 KDE x64 Live CD to install Fedora on the HDD by shrinking my Win7 partition by 100Gigs and then installed Fedora on it.
Now, the next time I booted into Windows 7 I got a message that my copy of Windows was not Genuine. Not sure what’s up with that, but I haven’t done anything about it, and I have not gotten the message again.
Now back to Fedora… I added the proprietary drivers for my Motherboard’s ATI Radeon 3300HD in an attempt to try to use wine to play Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) and a couple of other things, mostly some older games… after rebooting, I no longer get a GUI, just a blank black screen and about 8 lines down a blinking cursor. I can type, I can hit enter, but it does not respond. This has been going on since January 5th or so. Today I found out that Fedora has Virtual terminals just like FreeBSD, so very cool, I can at least get to a prompt today. Now I cannot find any assistance online for configuring the ATI drivers so I can get them to work. I know that a couple of versions ago they changed the command to configure the drivers, but I can’t find any helpful, current, information for this. I am lucky I found the aticonfig command again. I think I can figure it out from here though. It just bugs me that the only info I could find said not to use the drivers, then if you go to Wine‘s website they tell you if you don’t use the proprietary drivers that you can expect your games not to run well. What a pain. (not as big of a pain as my leg though) after searching for “aticonfig linux” I found some more info…
Will try and update again this week on how things are going, I am also working on my taxes so who knows… right now I am doing it on TurboTax.com but I think I will try a couple of others before I submit, even though I have used Turbo Tax for 15 years or so.
Right, so lets see if I can close this back story up now (edit: okay, I broke it up into 2 posts, as it was getting pretty long!!). not that I am not enjoying recalling my endevors, but it might actually take me longer to recount all of it if I keep up the pace I have been following. So, onward.
I RMA’d one of my Seagate HDD’s, a 240gig, I was disappointed they did not offer me an “upgrade” option. When you RMA with Seagate they “may” give you the option of upgrading to a different model (in the same series) at a discounted rate; however this was not an option with my drive. Needless to say I was disappointed, as I would have loved to get a larger drive in exchange as I may just be upgrading it anyway. well after almost 3 months of begging and hunting for a box from someone to ship the drive out, I started getting bad sector reports from another drive (may have mentioned this in a previous post) so I decided I was going to buy a 640gig 7200 RPM SATA2 with a 32 meg cache drive and ship my RMA out in the box that the new drive would come in. Things happened, and I ended up doing something else with the money. So one day I was digging around for stuff in the bin I keep my pc parts and cables in.
time for another tangent… at least this one is related. I move a LOT, actually right now is the first time I have stayed in an apartment complex for more than 12 months, and on average I move every 6-9 months. Except for the few times I have lived in a house, this is actually the first time my street address has not changed at least once in a calendar year since the 18 months I spent at the same apt in college (that was a decade ago if you are curious). So anyways… I have found that moving in garbage and grocery bags is very non-productive. so one year (I have no idea how long ago, although I do at least know in what state!!) I was wandering around in a Target (I think, could have been Walmart, but I do not think so) and saw that Christmas colored 14-18 gallon plastic bins were on sale ½ price (this would be either January or February) so I bought 23 +/- 3 or 4 plastic bins, and have been moving in them ever since, several of them got left in my parents place in Las Vegas, but other than those (and the ones I returned after moving that year (late 90′s)), I still have some of those that I am using today. Since then I have picked up some lovely Halloween colored bins as well, and a couple blue ones when I had to move in the middle of the summer a couple of times these last 4 or 5 years.
So, my pc parts are in a Halloween bin, onwards… I was digging through my PC parts bin and came across the box for the 500gig Maxtor (Maxtor is now Seagate) Western Digital Caviar green HDD I bought in Best Buy 2 or 3 years ago, it had a plastic clam shell instead of the foam padding, but it was “original packaging” so I figured it should count… got it packaged up and shipped out (this was late October, early November. yes I sent the RMA in during late June, early July, and YES, I had to submit a new one). my replacement drive came back nice and quick and is working well.
(edit: right forgot to mention this post was generated using Firefox on a Fedora 12 Virtual machine)
After this post I should catch up to the here and now pretty quick…
right, so I had (finally) Ubuntu running with all the hardware working, and started messing with wine and trying to get World of Warcraft and DDO to run. no good that was. both were requiring the newest video drivers from AMD (I think that was what was wrong, never quite figured it out…) the games would both load but would fail at some point, and have other issues… including not allowing me to login or play… 
Well the video driver issue ended up being that (yes it did install fine) the on-board video on the laptop had just (and I do mean within a couple of weeks/a month or two) been taken out of the newest updates, and had been placed in the “legacy drivers” list. mean while, before I actually figured this out, was installing dot net (nearly every version) into wine, and flash, and java, and all kinds of stuff. I Was getting really excited, the laptop was working great, even if not with the OS I really wanted. especially since I could not find this model on the inet anywhere as being functional in linux. (the wireless and audio is what normally fails to function, and I had both working in more than one flavor of linux)
then one day at work a co-worker was looking into selling an old IBM T40 laptop and we were shocked to see people paying $150 or more for them. so I decided what the heck… I put my laptop on Craig’s list one after noon about 3pm. I had 4 emails and 3 phone calls before 8pm that night. decided to sell it to the first caller, they wanted win XP, so I wiped it (oh well, good learning experience) and set it up for them, then they had to postpone coming to get it, because of a dinner party they had forgotten about, then they were not sure if they could get it, and told me to not hold it for them anymore. well I did not get it sold, and now had win XP barebonez’d on it and login ID’s setup for people who would never see it, let alone use it.
oh well, not sure if I mentioned this or not, but I started having some wierd HDD errors on my semi-new desktop PC. failed writes, ticking noises while the drives were spinning, drives disappearing, then coming back after rebooting… it looks like I may have 2 or 3 bad HDDs. I get all the data moved off the Seagate that was reporting bad sectors and I get an RMA setup, quick and painless… now I just need to find a box, or “original shipping packaging” anyone who has not had this on hand and has had to look for it will know. it’s not real easy to find a custom fitted HDD packaging that perfectly fits the box you plan on sticking it in, and has a minimum of 2″ of foam on all sides. So I decided to ask around at work… I also submitted a tech help request with ECS, the manufacturer of my motherboard, as I was having both video problems AND HDD issues at this point.
on to the next issue that was going on…
so I had to go to Pittsburgh for training for work, 1 week, 2 semi-high level virtual server training courses taught by an IBM instructor (AU72 AU78 and AU73 the AIX Virtual I/O Server training. I’ll check at work tomorrow and will update if wrong on those –updated). had an awesome time in Pittsburgh, got to meet the team I was working with virtually, and learned a tonne of stuff. (I prefer the metric tonne to the American ton, so much more useful, and a conversation piece when used in writing… 
pictures are available on picasaweb there are not a whole lot of images (50 something), I was working (and no I did not take any images of where I was working, but there is a hint about for whom I do work. sorry folks I might slip somewhere, but company policy severely “suggests” that I do not disclose anything about my employment that is not necessary…) most of the time (working that is, I got distracted and used one of my parenthetical explanations that I am overly fond of and are truly not necessary, nor wanted by most. HOWEVER, and this is the good part, I am writing this, not you, and you are not paying me to do so!! SO!! I will use excessively long descriptions/mental overture if you will, at my discretion. I sure hope WordPress has a good spell checker, cuz I make up words all the time) umm… now where was I?
oh yeah, I was working most of the time, and so only took a few pictures, now that I no longer have a semi-pro DSLR (Canon 20D) I am stuck taking pic’s with a semi-crummy Kodak 6mp point-and-shoot. Back to the point.. The weekend I got back from Pittsburgh, and I had to move, across the hall from a nice 1150-ish sq ft 2 BR apt to a kinda cramped 950-ish sq ft 1 BR apt. Things got switched around, and now my Sheeva Plug fails 80% of the system checkpoints during bootup (not that I blame the move, just that I had no problems with it before this). it still functions (ie. turns on and I can log in via the console), except the network port interface is kaput… (defined as “ka·put also ka·putt (kä-p t, -p t, k-) adj. Informal. Incapacitated or destroyed.” at www.thefreedictionary.com/kaput ) (fyi I still have not gotten around to reflashing the ROM on it, which I learned back in early june, is necessary to allow the usage of SD Media Cards.)
HA! not sure what I talked about in this one, was a little distracted (doing some things on my desktop in preparation to RMA the MB…) but I’ll go ahead and post it as I hit 1k words.
- New blog post... Diablo III closed Beta http://t.co/dKC2ChWm
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- New blog post... Computer upgrades http://t.co/6PWVNy4m
- $7 for $15 Worth of Hand-Tossed Pizza, Calzones, and Drinks at Andolini's Pizza Charleston, SC http://t.co/QnKwPwB
- New blog post... is zdnet.com/news down http://t.co/DThuI4r
- New blog post... Netflix Down? http://bit.ly/q74Svu
