Christmas presents

I haven't blogged since quite some time and when I did it was because of a sad story. But now it is different. Christams is close and I already got some gifts from my friend from over the ocean and from myself. ;-) Read the rest only if you have enough free time to spend on blog-reading. After almost 4 years of usage I partially retired my old desktop computer, which served me so well. During this time I did spent some on improving it, but those were mostly because of hardware failures. Let's see a history of my recent computers:

• I had a AMD 450Mhz K6-2 with 64MB, ~7GB, S3 Savage computer with a 15" monitor during the last year in the University. I cannot remember since when I have, but from around 1999. I was happy with it and after I bought a new one, my wife used for 4 years and now it serves my father. The first bad sector appeared only half a year ago on one of the disks.
• I bought a PIII-500Mhz, 192MB, 6GB laptop from my very first salaries. I still use that laptop when I travel and was my main machine for about 2 weeks now, but certainly I don't like to use for developing. Otherwise it is fine.
• when I came back to Romania, in the beginning of 2002, I bought a new PC which was quite fast compared to the old ones: Athlon XP 1600+, 256MB, Geforce2MX with 64MB, 40GB, 17" Hansol monitor. I had to replace the processor witn an XP2000+ due to a failure (my bad), bought another 512MB meantime as I thought the 256MB module is bad, but it wasn't. The condensers on the mainboard were bad. I fixed it, but only months after I bought a new mainboard...

And here we are. Some months ago I decided that I should do an upgrade, and I thought about several possibilities: upgrade the hard disk (I'm always out of space), upgrade the monitor (I like the LCD's) or the processor. From my work point of view the latter is the most important. A bigger hard disk would be nice, but I can live with what I have. An LCD monitor would be nice as well, but they are just too expensive. I think I would rather buy a quality 21" monitor from the price of a better 19" LCD. And anyway, my current monitor is quite good. Reducing compilation and debugging time is always nice. But there was an unexpected problem: it is not possible to buy an Athlon XP 3200+ with Barton code. The stores don't really have Socket A processors anymore, and if they do they are Semprons. According to the specifications, an Athlon XP 2000+ is about at the level of a Sempron 2400+. The best Sempron I could find was rated for 2800+. It is faster, but I would not be happy with only this improvement. Then Eric came with the idea to switch to the Athlon 64 architecture. But for that it only makes sense if you switch directly to Socket 939, where the slowest processor is a Athlon 64 3000+. After some calculations, I decided to go this way. Eric promised to sponsor the switch at least with the price of the mainboard. So I picked a better, but not too expensive Asus A8V-Deluxe mainboard (there is a more expenisce WiFi version, which can act as an access point as well, but I don't have a big network, nor WiFi in the laptop, so I did not pick that one) and decided to get the Athlon 64 3200+. Just slightly more expensive over the 3000+, but much cheaper than the next 3500+. As the processor is more expensive here (with about $60) than in the US, I asked Eric to buy there and ship it to me. Well, this wasn't painful at all. Instead of the promised 4-7 days it took about 15 days of getting here, days when I was very upset and without a computer, as meantime I started to sell my old PC. And if we do an upgrade, let's do a right one. Socket 939 mainboards can work in dual channel DDR mode, so I sold my 256MB module and decided to buy a 512MB, so I will have 2x512MB. Unfortunately the module I wanted to buy did not work together with my old module. Thanks to my careness, I asked to test it at the store... The solution was to buy a pre-packaged 2x512MB module. A friend of my sells PC parts, so he took in my old memory and I bougth an 1GB Corsair ValueSelect memory package. I also decided to upgrade my old Geforce2MX to a Geforce FX5500 with 256MB RAM. This is still a budget card, but I'm not a heavy gamer anymore and will be more than enough. So what looked like a simple CPU upgrade became a complete architectural change, a memory and video card upgrade as well. If I count now, I payed only a little more to what I would pay for a Barton 3200+. It's true this happened only because I could sold my old components and because Eric generously sponsored me with the processor itself. And not only that! He sent me another gift, an RCA Lyra MP3/Radio player. And USB device with 256MB RAM, extensible with an SD card. Quite nice. And not only that! He even sent some toys to my cat. He likes it very much. When I opened the box he jumped on it and quikly found the toy alone and grab out of the box. :-) I think it is drug for cats. Good that I wasn't arrested when I picked up the package. And how is this new system? My wife told me: the bad thing is that it is not visible from outside how much I spent on it. The good thing is that it is fast. I upgraded my SuSE to the x86_64 version and after fixing some Qt links, I started to recompile all the custom software I had, including the whole KDE from 3.5 branch. I cannot give a figure for the whole KDE, but both kdelibs and kdebase was compiled under 30 minutes/module. Compiling kdewebdev is about 15 minutes. Quanta compiles in about 7 minutes. That's very good. kdewebdev on the PIII500Mhz laptop takes at least an hour if not more... The mainboard is overclocking friendly, so I couldn't avoid to not try it out. Now the CPU works like a 3500+ and it is very stable and the temperature is still under/around 50C during heavy compilation. I have some issues to sort, though:

• the MP3 player is not recognized correctly as an USB mass storage device. This seems to be SUSE 10.0 specific, as with Knoppix work fine, while with SUSE 10.0 on my laptop it gives the same error: "unknown partition table". I may need to file a bug for the kernel or for SUSE. From my experience, doing the first might not help at all. Maybe the SUSE guys will react faster and more seriously. Hm, Eric just confirmed me that with Gentoo and the "same" 2.6.13 kernel it works for him. So it must be SUSE specific.
• I have 3 optical devices (DVD writer, DVD-ROM, CD-Writer - just because it is a Plextor and nobody would pay the price it worths, so I will not sell it -), so I wanted to put the hard disk on a separate cable. As the mainboard has an IDE RAID controller as well (just like the old one I had), I wanted to put either the DVD-ROM or the HDD on it. In the first case, the DVD-ROM is not recognized at all, in the second case the computer boots from the HDD, but SUSE does not recognize the disk. I tried to re-install, but even if I load the Promise module, it still does not recongize the partitions. Well, I gave up and put the DVD and the HDD on the same cable, but the problem still bugs me a little.
• some applications are not native 64 bits in SUSE (well, this does not bother too much), and some I cannot compile at all, like mplayer. This is a problem and I have to solve. And I already found some errors in 3rd party KDE code which had assumptions that everyone is working on i386 (casting issues).
• I can still see this [https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=115844] SUSE bug. I even removed my /opt/kde3 directory and reinstalled the KDE packages. Whatever. It's true, I updated my installation, I did not do a clean install, as I did not want to reconfigure everything again. I think I have to live with this bug. And there is another SUSE bug in /etc/init.d/alsasound. SuSE fails to load the modules for me, so I had to use echo -n "Starting sound driver" load_modules && start_rest # hack - in case the mixer isn't restored (sleep 1; $alsactl -f $asoundcfg restore) rc_status

in the start) section. For me it looks like a bug, as it loads the modules in restart, but not in start.

I'm happy right now. I did not get such things for myself for a long time, I usually spent the money I had to repair the house, the car and for daily expenses. Only that now I feel shame that my wife did not get such a present. Well, I have more expensive hobbies...