Building the Perfect Beast

[elfs]

So, I put the Dark Fleet Hot Rod together. It took a blood sacrifice, and some moments of stupidity, as well as panic. The stupidity came when I realized that I'd put the cooling block on without taking off the plastic protector on the copper heat transfer; the panic came when I had trouble getting one of the cooling block's mount keys to turn back into place. But eventually I got it all back together and it seems to be working just fine. The blood sacrifice was my scratching myself on the edge of the case.

It's a very nice case. It has a wiring closet, a channel with clips along one side that lets your cables run from the power supply to the motherboard, and from the various front panel assets to the mother board, without having to have the cables wander back and forth over the motherboard. (You had to see the inside of my last one. It was a rat's nest of cables, mostly due to the eight IDE drives.)

Omaha was upset. "You turned our office into a... a... a man cave! Complete with smell!" Apparently my laboring over a desktop computer for hours on end had made me sweat a lot. I took a shower while the format ran.

But it's running now. It posted the first time without a problem. Except I couldn't install anything-- I'd forgotten to run a power cable to the DVD drive. That was a quick fix, and off we go.

I'm installing Windoze (yes, that OS) on the smaller of the two SATA drives I got for it. I wanted a gaming machine as well as a work station, and Windoze is de riguer for that. After this, I turn on the other drive and install Linux. (Yes, Gentoo. Pbbbpptptptp.) That's why I got the Nvidia card, not the Radeon. Nvidia's drivers are known to work.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

After this, I turn on the other drive and install Linux. (Yes, Gentoo. Pbbbpptptptp.)

So you should be done installing Linux by tomorrow, then? *evil-gryn*

[elfs.livejournal.com]

On this machine? It took less than three hours. It took Windows longer just to format the half-gig NTFS drives than it did for me to build the base install, format a one-gig /home partition, and call "emerge world" on a full suite of Gnome, KDE, Chromium, Emacs, Firefox, etc. And after Windows was installed, I still had to wrestle with the motherboard and video card driver disks. Linux was all "lspci | genkernel" and done.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Hey now … I'm a long-term Linux geek, going back to the mid 1990's. ;) My desktop and laptop are both Linux-only boxes now.

I was pulling your leg about Gentoo. It still has a reputation in my mind for being … excessive. Usually, a customized kernel gives you the bulk of your performance gains. Building the rest of the software from scratch yields much more modest performance improvements. Or at least, it did a few years back, according to the articles I saw.

Me? I currently use KUbuntu, having switched from Fedora after I was laid off 1.5 years ago. I used Fedora/RedHat for many years, was using Debian in the late-90's, and started out with Slackware. ^_^ I switched to KUbuntu from Fedora for one reason and one reason only: It still supported KDE v3.5. Back two years ago, KDE4 struck me as a bad copy of Windows+OS-X, only with fewer features and more bugs. That's still my impression.

In fact, the one thing I hate about KDE4 … and XFCE and GNOME … is the assumption that everyone has infinitely-tall monitors. Vertical screen real-estate is limited, but there's plenty of room on the sides, what with modern wide-screen monitors. But you can't orient your taskbar/panel/etc. vertically without screwing up the sizes of things in them. So for now, I'll stick with the KDE3.5 "Trinity" project.