Went out and bought computer crap today. I'll call it my bonus for actually going to work for these next three days (pay for this week should about cover the parts).
The motherboard I got is pretty nifty, though it requires no less than 3 extra expansion slots to hold all of the excess connectors for USB, FireWire, and audio (although the board I got didn't come with the audio riser thingy—I may have to go order one, but I might just get a PCI sound card).
I've been battling with the IDE controller and Ethernet drivers. The Linux kernel that comes on a standard Debian install disc doesn't understand either one properly. I had purchased a 200GB drive earlier, but the older kernel only understod ATA100 drives and lower, meaning that I could only see the first ~137GB of the hard drive. So, I looked through my closet and found a 1GB drive (my former roommates at UV will recognize this one as the tormentor that I had placed in the sun room for my audio playback box). That installed fine, and I eventually was able to upgrade to a kernel that understands the IDE controller well enough to access the entire 200GB of my big disk.
Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten the gigabit Ethernet chip working (Broadcom Tigron3 5788). The most recent stable release of the Linux kernel (2.4.22) doesn't support the card, but there is a driver for the basic chipset “family” that it's in. I did some searches and discovered that the chipset should be supported properly in the prerelease kernels for 2.4.23. So, I've got to figure out how difficult it will be to compile this stuff.
Fortunately, I've had my 256MB USB keychain drive to sneakernet things onto this new box. I tried hooking the new machine up to my desktop system via FireWire, but something gets messed up whenever I try that.
There was a strange little sticker on one of the USB ports saying to not use that particular port when Bluetooth is in use. I haven't been able to figure out if there's actually a Bluetooth module on the motherboard, but it would be cool if there was. In theory, I could use that instead of finding an IR receiver for a remote control. Well, if a signal can manage to penetrate the computer case ;-)
Posted by mike at October 11, 2003 10:55 PM | Hardware , Software , Wireless | TrackBack