Entries Tagged 'hardware' ↓

After having glxgears reaching about 1500 FPS on my old FX5200 card (128MB AGP), my brand new GeForce 6600 (256MB PCI-E 16x) makes me very happy with it’s 3500FPS. Yes! I guess now I can have fun with Xgl.

Hooray! I’m all excited with my new Dell laptop!

It’s a Dell Latitude 120L, Pentium M 1.73Ghz (Centrino), 512MB DDR2, 40GB HD, DVD-RW, Intel wireless and a 14.1″ wide-screen. It is sooooo cool!

BTW, it surely runs SUSE Linux 10.1!

Ps.: The older laptops are being retired. They’re coming back to their original owners, so I’m going to stay with only this one laptop and the recently upgraded desktop.

Recently AMD (processors) bought ATI (gfx cards) and they will be soon announcing new tech developments that will probably make the GFX market a little more stronger. Think about having a processor tightly integrated with the chipset and the gfx card. That would probably make smaller computers, less power comsumption (thus less heat) and with more processing force. Interesting future we may see ahead.

I’ve finally got my first 64 bits system!

After a motherboard crash, I had to decide if I was going to install a regular socket 754 based system and save some money, or spend a little more a go all trough socket 939. But the fact is that I was definetely sure that I wanted a 64 bits system (and, of course, the computer stores near me none had any 32 bits mobo/proc anymore ).

Now I’ve got an ECS RS482-M. I know it’s not the best, and I don’t like ATI graphics chips, but it’s a cheap socket 939 mobo, and it delivers me everything I need (PCI-Express, DDR400 dual channel, SATA, etc). Speaking about PCI-Express, I didn’t buy a graphics card yet, I’ll still stick with the on-board ATI X200 (terrible chip btw, my old FX5200 was much better), but I’m still deciding which NVIDIA card I’m going to buy.

I also got an Athlon64 3000+. It’s a very fast processor, and just my first one on the 939 road (I know, M2 is out, but it’s still expensive). Also, for a better performance, I’ve got two 512MB Samsung DDR 400MHz, that will use the full power of the dual-channel architecture (and yes, DDR2 is also too expensive).

Unfortunately I don’t have much time to play with it now. I’ll be on a business trip for the next two weeks, so I’ll be delaying the fun. Here’s my TODO list: reinstall the system with a 64bits SUSE 10.1, make 3D work on the ATI on-board card, and/or buy a PCI-Express NVIDIA.

BTW, Linux rocks! (of course) I didn’t had to reinstall anything for this motherboard change (the older had a VIA chipset, the new is ATI-based). The only thing I had to do was booting into rescue mode and rebuild the initrd so it would load sata_sil instead of sata_via. Cool as always!

Bad, bad luck…

Yesterday I’ve got two bad mother boards: my home desktop, and the HP laptop I was working with. Neither of them boots anymore…
Fortunately I still have the good old Vaio, so I can work until I decide what to do.

Oh, my…

Today I bought a new wireless card. It’s a D-Link DWL-G520, rev B3, Atheros chipset, works perfectly with MadWifi (YaST detected it immeditaly as soon as I loaded the kernel module). I’ve got good speed rates (although I still think 30Mb/s isn’t enough), finally managed to make it run in Master mode with WPA encryption (acx111 only do WEP on Master, and ndiswrapper won’t even enter Master mode), and got Kismet working (as a consultant, I’m starting to need to test my clients’ WLAN strenghts).

Related to that, yesterday I also switched my laptop’s Linksys WPC54G for an IBM 802CAG for almost the same reasons. First of all the Linksys’ Broadcom chipset still doesn’t have a stable Linux native driver, and because of that I still have to use it with ndiswrapper (what is rather unconfortable, since it limits the experience in many ways). On the other hand, the IBM card uses an Atheros chipset, so I can also use it with MadWifi. The second reason is that the Linksys card can’t do Super G, while either the IBM and D-Link cards can, so I will manage to get better speeds. Third and last reason: I also needed to run Kismet on my laptop.

By the way, two tips for SUSE users. (a) I couldn’t make SUSE’s MadWifi packages to work correctly because I could only find madwifi RPM, but not madwifi-kmp-* on the main repository (help here?), but simply adding MadWifi’s official repo got everything running. (b) The Kismet package on SUSE’s repository refused to work with the latest MadWifi drivers, so I had to build my own upgraded package (check into my repository).

What happened to my other wireless card? Unfortunately it wasn’t working so well because the acx111 driver has a bug that makes tranfers stall under high load. That’s a known bug and they plan to correct it some time in the future, but unfortunately I can’t help (I know very little C, and even less kernel module programming) and I can’t wait (I often need large transfers from my laptop to my desktop). I’m still deciding if I’ll keep or sell it (anyone interested?).

I finally decided to activate my Flick account, and for that I chose a picture from the three computers I’m currently working with. The word ‘currently’ here applies in the way that only the desktop is really mine, the others belong to two clients I’m currently working to, but both stay with me.

From left to right:

• Sony Vaio PCG-Z505SX - Pentium II 366Mhz, 384MB PC100, HD 6GB IBM UDMA/33, LCD 12″, wireless Linksys WPC54G.
• My destop I build myself - AMD Sempron 2400+ (overclocked), cooler Thermaltake Volcano 12, motherboard ABIT KV7, 512MB DDR 400Mhz, HD 80GB Samsung SATA, HD 80GB Samsung UDMA/133, HD 40GB Western Digital, CD-RW LG CED-8080B, DVD-RW LG GSA-4167B, wireless Airlink AWLH3025.
• HP Evo n1020v - Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 512MB PC133, HD 40GB Compaq UDMA/100, LCD 15″, CD-RW+DVD-R (combo), wireless Linksys WPC54G.

Obviously all of them run SUSE Linux.
BTW, the photo was taken using a Sony DSC-S40B.

Do you wanna know how much wattage do you need on your PC case power supply? Check this site.

Argh… My home PC have a bad memory chip. It took me 3 days with a non-working machine to realize what was going on. Now I’m 256MB short…

Note to myself: how about buying 2×1GB this time?

–en
I finally bought a wireless card for my home PC. It’s an Airlink AWLH3025 that works out-of-the-box with my SUSE 10.0. It’s great that the only thing I had to do was running YOU, fetching installacx111firmware.sh, and configure the card on YaST just like any other wireless card. I might say it was easier than configuring a Linksys WPC54G with ndiswrapper. Now I can have my notebook connected to the internet at home without a 3mt LAN cable across my living room.

–pt_BR
Finalmente comprei uma placa wireless para meu PC em casa. � uma Airlink AWLH3025 que funcionou de primeira com meu SUSE 10.0. Gostei do fato de só ter que rodar o YOU, instalar o installacx111firmware.sh e configurar a placa com o YaST como se fosse um wireless qualquer. Devo dizer que foi bem mais fácil do que configurar uma Linksys WPC54G com o ndiswrapper. Agora posso ter meu notebook conectado à internet em casa sem ter um cabo de 3mt atravessando minha sala.