|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
TCHS 4O 2000 [4o's nonsense] alvinny [2] - csq - edchong jenming - joseph - law meepok - mingqi - pea pengkian [2] - qwergopot - woof xinghao - zhengyu HCJC 01S60 [understated sixzero] andy - edwin - jack jiaqi - peter - rex serena SAF 21SA khenghui - jiaming - jinrui [2] ritchie - vicknesh - zhenhao Others Lwei [2] - shaowei - website links - Alien Loves Predator BloggerSG Cute Overload! Cyanide and Happiness Daily Bunny Hamleto Hattrick Magic: The Gathering The Onion The Order of the Stick Perry Bible Fellowship PvP Online Soccernet Sluggy Freelance The Students' Sketchpad Talk Rock Talking Cock.com Tom the Dancing Bug Wikipedia Wulffmorgenthaler       |
|
bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ entry views: 2463 today's page views: 254 (15 mobile) all-time page views: 3241447 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1213 page created Sat Apr 5, 2025 13:56:53 |
|
- tagcloud - academics [70] art [8] changelog [49] current events [36] cute stuff [12] gaming [11] music [8] outings [16] philosophy [10] poetry [4] programming [15] rants [5] reviews [8] sport [37] travel [19] work [3] miscellaneous [75] |
|
- category tags - academics art changelog current events cute stuff gaming miscellaneous music outings philosophy poetry programming rants reviews sport travel work tags in total: 386 |
| ||
|
- + linux - + sim lim square - That's Week One of Seventeen over and done with. Crashed two lectures (and nearly a third) in my free time, one on Metaphysics (which I was planning to take, sometime), and the other on MATLAB. Got a taste of my first graduate class. Concluded that there's no real need to get intimidated or anything - don't see that much difference between a Level 5 module and a Level 1 one yet. New projects demand new setups, or rather the revival of an old one lost in the Nasty November crash. Firstly, I'll be needing some flavour of Linux on my system, and taken with the reputation of Red Hat, I kept with their Fedora Core offering, now at version 6 ("Zod") - still have the CDs for FC1 "Yarrow" somewhere. Contrary to popular perception, Linux is not always a bare-bones geek OS, and Fedora Core 6 takes up five full CDs, and one rescue disc. Even a minimal standard install will require the first two CDs, which may seem surprising as Windows XP only needs one CD (if I remember rightly). There are more compact Linux distros, of course, and Ubuntu (1 CD) is highly favoured by some. The very impatient might go for Damn Small Linux (50 MB), which can be booted from a thumb drive! Well, I put my Bittorrent client to legitimate use, and got the few Gigs of Fedora Core 6 images onto my computer over several days. Burned them to physical CDs and got going. Windows XP users may at this time realise that Linux is not just another program, it's a whole spanking operating system! For starters, it demands its own hard disk partition (if you know a way to install Linux on the same partition as XP, please let me know), with its own filesystem (ext3 prefably), as opposed to XP's NTFS. More experienced users will probably already have their drives carved up, and in my case I happily had two drives with a total of eight partitions - I just sacrificed a 50GB one for Linux. After making sure that no wanted data is left on that partition, I simply let the Fedora Core 6 installation take care of the reformatting issues - there's an option within the installation process itself to delete the original NTFS partition, and further subpartition it into /boot (ext3), swap (swap) and whatever one may want. Note that the partition I sacrificed was not the first one on that particular hard disk drive, so there shouldn't be any problem with MBRs. One may wonder at this point - how do we get to choose which operating system to log on to at boot? My old solution was to install GRUB on the second drive's first partition and point BIOS to boot from it. This time round, I decided on the solution outlined here. It involves using the rescue disc to create a boot.lnx file, and using the XP boot manager instead. Edit the timeout to three seconds or thereabouts; Future boots will conveniently continue loading XP by default if Fedora is not selected within that time. Be careful not to put GRUB on the Master MBR in this case, whatever you do. Once this is done, the hard part of installing Fedora Core 6 should be over. The remainder should be straightforward, and soon the nifty login screen, in chrome DNA theme, appears: 
It was just a dark blue screen for Yarrow. (from Fedora Project Wiki) Unfortunately, I would say Fedora Core 6 won't endear itself to the casual user much (other than the price front, that is). It's true, Average Joe wants to click buttons and have stuff work, which for the most part is what happens in Windows. Case in point: Pretty ugly fonts in the default Firefox 1.5 browser. They don't have Verdana, for Torvald's sake! Probably some licensing problem or another, whereas for the original Fedora Core, everything looked beautiful out of the box. It's not unsurmountable - Mauriat Miranda's Personal Fedora Core 6 Installation Guide has a quick fix - but it's gonna be a turnoff for many. Oh yes, the graphics card drivers also have to be installed manually to enable the cool desktop-rotating-cube effect, but that's another story. Few may have known it, but the Geforce FX 5500 that the PC shop people threw into my computer never really worked at 32-bit true color. Oh, it displayed stuff alright most of the time, but on dark backgrounds like my desktop (and this blog), there would be the most irritating green flickering pixels where there were subtle gradients. Ended up operating in 16-bit color just to be rid of them. Believe me, I spent hours of research on trying to get rid of that, from reinstalling various versions of nVidia's Forceware drivers (66.93, 84.21, 93.71) with my LCD monitor's drivers in various configurations, blowing non-existent dust from the card and meddling with the BIOS, all to no avail. Finally I concluded that it was broke, likely some bad memory, and there was no fixing it. Junking it was not such a hard decision to take, especially given that the Geforce FX is 2002 technology, and the 5500 is low-end 2002 tech at that; My old ATI Radeon 9600 PRO was probably on a par with it, especially as ATI had a huge lead over nVidia at about that period. Armed with some of the cash from the December job, I scoured the Internet for recommendations. How much was I willing to spend? In the region of $200, which can buy most of a decent computer these days. One of my uncles didn't believe that a respectable system can be had for $300+ nowadays, assuming that one possesses a monitor and an OS. An illustrative example from one of the leaflets crammed into my hands at Sim Lim Square yesterday: Intel Celeron 2.66GHz LGA 775/DUO CORE Mainboard 256MB DDR2 533 Memory 80GB 7200RPM Hard Disk Drive 52X CD ROM Drive PS2 Keyboard and Optical Mouse ATX Case with 450 Watts Power Supply USB2.0 4 Ports 2X Front 2X Rear Integrated Sound and Graphics Price? $339. Won't run any top-of-the-line games, but perfectly acceptable for word processing and surfing, and I daresay most games which came out a few years ago. I settled on an nVidia Geforce 7600 GS at the end, seeing as how I don't play many new releases nowadays either. Problem One: Upon inspection, my micro ATX Foxconn motherboard only has an soon-to-be-obsolete AGP slot, and no PCIe ones. Most new cards are built for PCIe slots. Luckily, some manufacturers have anticipated this issue that poor sods like me have. In return, they get my business. 
ASUS N7600GS SILENT box Silent? Zero decibels? That's because... 
Look Ma, no fans! Yes, it has a passive cooling solution - no moving parts, simply a huge heatsink that covers most of the card. This ain't Old Trafford, one doesn't want any fans to make any noise; The metal can go up to ninety degrees Celsius under heavy load, so I wouldn't touch it then if I were you. Not much chance of that, though. 
The sticker's not scaring anyone I had to open up the casing again... the warranty on this must have been voided many times over, but darned if I'm going down to the shop each time I need something put in. 
And it's in! Installation was a breeze - the only trouble was the small form factor of my mini tower casing - would never have gotten such a casing if I were DIY-ing. Had to pull a little to get a power connector to get to the card, but neither snapped. My grandpa helped at this point to remove the front cover of the casing to slip in a DVD-writer that was sitting around, instead of slowly unassembling the disk drive frames from the side. Didn't do it myself because I sensed that I would break something, and was justified since with all his experience, my grandpa only broke a very small inconsequential plastic hook. 
The Return of the Fan To top it off, we cannibalised the green case fan from my old PC. Kinda defeats the purpose of a fanless card, but the case fan's pretty silent so... Real ultimate defeat in punting last week - $1601.45/$1800 now. But why shrink from sticking my neck out now? $50 on Man U (-1.5) vs Aston Villa (at 1.77) - yes, some people never learn $20 on Arsenal (-1.5) vs Blackburn (2.90) - Gunners in fine scoring form. Like, 90% conversion rate vs Pool? $20 on Chelski to draw Wigan (5.30) - Mourinho leaving? Perhaps not, but the Ruskies don't look too bright now $10 on zero goals in Watford vs Liverpool (9.00) - not likely, but given the payoff... Next: Blue Lions, Red Devils
Trackback by visit your url
|
|
|||||||||
 Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved. |
||||||||||
