Welcome to Trantor...

[mdlbear]

... now go $HOME. Trantor.thestarport.org, that is -- it's the nodename of my new (as of yesterday) workstation. I was getting tired of Star Wars theme, I already had a thin client called Terminus, so...

It's a 1.8GHz Core2Duo on an ECS micro-ATX motherboard -- the combination was $99 at Fry's. On-board VIA graphics (the sales droid told me Intel, and I foolishly didn't check). I also spent $99 on a 2GB DDR2-800 memory stick -- more about that later, $89 on a Plextor optical drive, and $25(!), after a pair of $40 rebates, on an Antec Solo case and 380W power supply. No need for a hard drive, since I have a pair of 200GB Maxtor's sitting around from the file server upgrade.

It took about an hour and a half to assemble, and a few minutes to determine that the original Linux install on the disk was unsuitable as a starting point. I also tried Ubuntu (Feisty), but it hung on me. No problem, we have Debian.

Twenty minutes from power-up, I was looking at a gdm login screen. Started configuring fstab and installing the usual collection of apps. And it hung on me. It did this repeatedly, always when X was running. (I switched to a virtual terminal and left it running all night.)

Never mind that it passed memtest86+ just fine, it looked like a memory problem. And since the stick was twice as big and twice as fast as the board was designed for, it was the obvious candidate. I replaced it with a 512MB stick of DDR-333 from the flower_cat's dead machine, booted it, and it worked. Up 4:25 so far, running six different xscreensaver modules. Tomorrow after my walk I'll pick up a decent amount of RAM for it.

Later this evening I'll have another go at Ubuntu, and try Etch for AMD64. Or maybe tomorrow -- I should add the 64-bit packages to the mirror first.

It's not a maxed-out monster machine, but I don't need one. It's more than fast enough for audio editing and the occasional video, has well-supported 3-d graphics, gigabit ethernet, a delightfully quiet case -- and cost roughly the same as the cheapest available CD duplicator. It'll do just fine, and Dantooine, the overworked little 800MHz Via EPIA system it replaces will go back to being a thin client, print server, field recording box, or whatever.

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[mdlbear]

My father went to grad school with Asimov (Columbia, in chemistry) and introduced me to both computers and science fiction.