I got my computer parts today! I had to hunt down one of the mailroom workers because today is an XVIII Airborne Corps holiday so we all had the day off ... including the mail clerks. I happened to bump into one of them and asked if he could check to see if my stuff had arrived, because the Sergeant at the CQ desk told me that FedEx had been there just minutes before I got back from lunch. Grr..
So he opens the door (his barracks room is right next to the mailroom -- he doesn't have to go far to go to work) and, lo and behold, we find two gigantic boxes with my name on them. I signed them out and ran giddily up to my room with them. I tore them open and proceeded to put everything together. I'd never put one together from scratch before. Well, at least not one so new. About 12 years or so ago, sure. But there wasn't so much crap in them before! :-)
Anyway, read the diagram on what goes where (oh crap, I just realized, I think I left the two headers for the front USB ports disconnected) and put all (heh, well not all -- oops) the wires where the drawing said to put them, installed the graphics card and popped the hard drive and DVD and CD drives in and booted the thing up.
First thing I noticed was that even though there are 6 fans in this thing (3 case fans, 2 power supply fans and one on the processor) it generates less than 10% of the sound of my old machine. And, to let you know how old the other one was, I looked at the power supply and it was -- no shit -- 100W. Never really noticed that before. I'm surprised the thing even powered the hard drive and CD burner. This new one's got 450W.
Everything went fast. I popped in the Ubuntu for AMD-64 install CD and ran the install program. With the exception of the fact that it couldn't find the network (I, er, wasn't connected) it all went super quick. I'm just totally amazed at how much faster the whole thing runs. Programs pop up instantly instead of letting me watch individual buttons and labels appear in the GUI (not really that bad, but you get the picture).
*sigh* Still having a few problems, though. I dunno what to do at the moment. I have to go do laundry, though. I'll update again later.
Crisp
Tue Jun 21st 19:48:19 2005
Problems?
Frequency
Wed Jun 22nd 11:39:44 2005
Yeah, sound wasn't working, my network card would detect but wouldn't communicate , little stuff like that. I installed the driver from nVidia's site and the sound started working, and the network card (I realized this yesterday at work, too, but I don't know what made me think of it) was trying to use a 32-bit driver under a 64-bit kernel. Once I found the 64-bit driver everything was just fine.
Still having a problem with the DVD drive. It'll read CDs, but when I try to play a movie, it says it "can't read from device". :-\ Still working that one out.
The error says this: Buffer I/O error on device hdc, logical block 539524
hdc: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: command error: error=0x54
ide: failed opcode was 100
end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 2157852
/dev/hdc is the DVD drive.
Frequency
Wed Jun 22nd 11:42:08 2005
To clarify, that's what dmesg reports, and there are several of those messages in the report.