EasyLinuxGuide Blog

As the title implies, sometimes in life you can do the completely unnecessary as long as it is somehow justified. My latest upgrade was from an AMD Athlon XP 2600 and self-modded case to a new motherboard and AMD Athlon 64 @ 3200 and a new case. I decided on the Biostar Motherboard to the left. It had many qualifying factors including 4 ram slots, pci express (even though I don’t own a card for it yet), Nvidia chipset with decent onboard video (first one I’m trying out) which is actually better than the card in my previous box which was an MX440. Onboard everything else including ethernet and sound. It was a decent deal from Tigerdirect. My main system nicely planted in my living room acts as my server holding nearly a terabyte of disk space. It occured to me that it actually would benefit me to have a more powerful system elsewhere as my main system is typically used for holding data and not processor intensive tasks. I will use it to check email and enter boring blogs like this one that no one will read anyway So, it helped justify the upgrade. Otherwise, it was because I wanted another 64 bit system. I had wanted to try out many different 64 bit OS’s but if I set up a multiple boot system on my server, it would require a reboot into the other distro which would need to have my filesharing set up as well or booted back to the primary server OS. Hence more justification. It was also a good deal as well.

I built the system tonight which didn’t take long. The CPU and motherboard were separate even though it was purchased as a combo set. Affixing the cpu with some thermal paste was straight forward as usual. The case itself looks very nice, having a gamer type element but not to an unsightly degree. I ended up getting the Aspire X-Cruiser which is pictured below.

The X-Cruiser has several drive bays to accommodate for years to come. It can fit a Micro ATX Board like the Biostar that I purchased or a regular ATX board as well. I almost bought a mini tower or a shuttle case, but with 3 hard drives, it may have been difficult to fit everything in and allow for adequate cooling. The case was around $130 but ever since I bought the Chen-ming case pictured in the ELG Gallery, I learned the value of having a nice case if you can afford to spare a few extra dollars. The case came with 2 blue led fans. I replaced the one in the back with a 120mm fan instead of the smaller one provided. There is also a fan pointing through the top of the case as well. The front guages were very easy to get working with the included power cables that can be attached the power supply. I have yet to get the volt meter working, but that is not a concern at all at this point.

In terms of software, I had 5 different Operating Systems on the hard drives I transplanted into the new system. It contained my only Windows install which is almost entirely useless other than being something I have around in case I feel like getting infected with viruses or spyware. Upon bootup, as expected, Windows XP self destructed. I will almost surely have to reinstall, although I am contemplating just eradicating it entirely as usage is very infrequent. I had 4 versions of Linux installed as well including Arch, Frugalware, Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.06. Arch was using a custom kernel which required an upgrade to 2.6.18 (all done using a Linux live cd) to ensure the newer drivers were available for this board, otherwise all other distros load modules during boot using a default kernel so they automagically worked. The next step is to slowly migrate to 64 bit distros on that box including the customized Arch install. I will also have to decide on the necessity of having 3 hard drives in that system. Once the hard drives start piling up, it starts to feel more like it should be a server.

The payoff… I immediately noticed a difference in speed. Once into the Gnome desktop, all applications were more responsive using the same 1GB of DDR ram as the previous configuation. A kernel compile takes about 5 minutes which is about the same as my server which contains an Athlon 64 3000. So, I have a case, motherboard, cpu, some fans, a geforce mx440 video card, usb 2.0 card left over. This will have a dvd writer and hard drive added to it shortly and will be customized and sold to a set buyer. Again, justification.

I thought I would do an entry on this as I seem to be in the position to explain this more and more frequently lately and I find myself using this phrase often: “I don’t read the newspaper, I don’t listen to the radio and I don’t really watch much TV.” This typically is my response when someone attempts a conversation with me about a current event. I don’t mean to come across as egocentric as I do not consider myself of that quality, however; there is an inherent value in giving energy and attention to matters close to home. Each of these forms of media have lost a lot of meaning and value for me and here is why… The news is always sensationalized and most people are so desensitized that it is an uphill battle akin to drug addiction: keep upping the dose so it gets more of a reaction. A lot of people are now numb to things that were apalling in the past due to this tendency. Almost all news is bad news. I’m not saying I couldn’t perservere through the day even if I hear some terrible stories, but why subject oneself to such a thing when it is completely optional? Take a look at a newpaper or watch the news and you will notice that it will undoubtedly include one or more of the following things: violence, natural disaster, international warring, negative comments on the economy and death. I’m not oblivious to the existance of these things but I’m not naive enough to overlook the effects this type of information would have on one’s daily psyche. Radio typically consists of two things that drive me away from it — too much banal dialogue and repetitious overplaying of the same songs or music I would never choose to play myself. Technology affords us the luxury of playing any song we want when we want with no interruptions. This is an easy choice in my opinion. I will keep the TV section short — commercials and availability are the two major reasons why TV is almost obsolete to me. Going to the movies has become so much of a hassle these days that it isn’t worth going anymore. Crowded parking lots, a full theatre with the token annoying person(s) directly around you (choosing a seat right near you even though others are readily available) and of course the insane pricing. Not to mention, you can’t pause the movie at any given moment like you can at home. Some will argue at the benefits of the bigscreen. While I can’t argue that it has an unrivalled sound system and picture size, I don’t ever remember watching a movie at home where I sporadically saw white and black spotting and lines appearing randomly on the screen. Switching to plasma or lcd and playing a dvd might be more clear – but then again, most people can do this at home which cements the whole argument. Could it be that someone somewhere wants us to stay home?

OK, so first comes the disclaimer… I am a huge music fan, I would say I cannot think of the last time I did not listen to music for a period of an entire day. Also, I do not claim to be an expert on music, but I do consider myself somewhat of an authority as a listener as, like a lot of people, I have numerous years of experience in this category. Now that we have that out of the way, there are certain things that I have witnessed ruining perfectly good songs otherwise and here are some examples:

• Long Fade outs — we know what it’s going to sound like and how you will say those same words for the next 3 minutes, so please spare us the white noise and just do a quick fade out, or better yet, have a good ending that punctuates the song.
• Singing about nursery rhymes or making childhood references that should be relegated to subject matter that actually warrants it.
• Repeating the same word or phrase more than 3 times consecutively without offering even a vocal change to it. Seriously, most people don’t have the attention span for this.
• Song titles with the word “song” in the title — we know it’s a song, there’s no need to remind us. It would be equivalent to labelling everything edible at the grocery store with “food” after the item’s name. This is unnecessarily redundant and unimaginative – especially for an “artist”.

I would like to thank the makers of Audacity which I commonly use to edit out those irritating long fade outs to make a decent song with extraneous banality added into a decent song again.

I read this book many years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is quite possibly my favorite book, certainly within the fiction genre anyway. Written by Patrick Suskind, it is the story of Jean Grenouille, a discarded newborn whose effortless and incidental intense perserverence carries him through a journey on his that has a profound effect on the world that happens to exist around him. Jean is born with an unparalleled sense of smell and while it is arguably one of the most overlooked of the 5 senses, Suskind eloquently depicts and violently weaves its unmistakable relevance to our existence throughout this favorite novel of the late Kurt Cobain. If you haven’t read it, once you do, you can start to imagine the alienation and isolation that a figure such as Cobain would have endured, understanding but not necessarily condoning his eventual demise. It does not appear that Perfume – The Story of a Murderer has its own homepage, but you can certainly view its imdb page. This is one of the most anticipated films for me in several years, in usual routine, movies tend not to live up to books, yet somehow reliving the experience of Perfume with visual and audio input with help solidify experiencing it through as many senses as possible.

I posted a previous blog discussing some other firefox extensions and found another that I found useful. If you have use of an ftp client at all, try Fireftp which not only does a nice job at performing its intended function of allowing for transferring files to and from a ftp location of your choice but also shows how Firefox itself could be an effective file browser. The reason why I tried it was because I was having trouble with other ftp clients causing issues when uploading large volumes of files. While I haven’t had any reason to test fileftp in this aspect, I do find it useful to use it conveniently as just another tab in Firefox while I am working on the same workspace. The makers of Fireftp have provided a screenshot to demonstrate its usage. Aesthetically, it can look better depending on your theme for your Desktop. Functionally it tends to work well and the convenience it affords is nice as well. As far as I can tell, it is available for all platforms.