Well, that was comparatively easy

[mdlbear]

Went to Fry's and bought a new CPU/Motherboard bundle for the fileserver: it's a comparatively crappy ECS MB with an AMD X2 BE-2330 processor. Under $90 with tax. Not terribly fast, but I don't need fast. Only one IDE connector, but 4 SATA, so that's OK. 100MB Ethernet, but it has two PCI slots, so that's OK. NVidia video, but it's a server, so I'm not using X. Swapped boards with the old one, and it just fscking worked.

Only thing that really needs fixing is the kernel -- the default kernel doesn't recognize the second core. (And of course it's in 32-bit mode -- fixing that would require a complete re-install, so I'm going to wait.)

The nice, quiet 1GHz VIA board that it replaced is, for some reason, not working particularly well: newer kernels don't seem to recognize the ethernet controller, and older ones don't see the mouse. Grump. May have to add an ethernet adapter and use it as a NAS box. Or maybe try Ubuntu.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

64-bit mode probably isn't worth it if you don't need fast. I would just go with the 32-bit kernel closest to the chip you've got and call it good...

[mdlbear]

Agreed. Doing a clean 64-bit install and trying to copy over all the config files would take a day; not worth it at this point. A new kernel's trivial, and in fact there appears to be an amd64 kernel available in 32-bit Etch.

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

> Not terribly fast
Not as fast as the latest Intel whiz-bangs, but even low end processors are amazingly responsive these days. The Intel-AMD price war has produced some incredible bargains. Compared to the old C3, you've probably got twice the clock speed, twice the instructions per clock, or more if there are floating point or vector operations in the mix, and two cores. It sounds like an order of magnitude speed up to me.

I'll second the thought of staying with 32 bits. It's definitely the well greased path path, and I'm not at all convinced that 64 bits buys much of anything unless big memory is involved.

[mdlbear]

Probably more than an order of magnitude if you count floating point -- the VIA CPUs suck at that. (It's a C7, but who's counting?)