Rob's Tips

A lot of days I come home from work and don't want to look at computer problems.  My main system before the 'Big New System' is 'psycho' a 3.2 gHz P4-HT and it's running sweet and all I want to do is veg out and surf the web.

My explanation, excuse, on why I have left the story of BNS aka 'titan' hanging. 
I have twice upgraded the bios and my key click and strange mouse problems are reduced enough that I can do an update all.  After an update everything works OK, kinda.

I wiped the system and installed Fedora Core 4 x86_64 and updated it.  My disappointment is that too many applications I want to use are non existent or not really written to take advantage of x86_64.  When you add the pain of removing the 64bit version of firefox and installing the 32bit one so that flash, realplayer and java work correctly it just isn't worth it.  Xine and mplayer were quite unstable also.  maybe it's me.

I wiped the system and installed CentOS x86_64.  It was more stable than FC-4 but still had all the pain.  By the by, I got the most stable results with FC-4 and CentOS by loading the system then using the 'dag' repositories to upgrade.  I like that site.

Next I tried kubuntu, the kde based version of Ubuntu.  I like it.  I am using kubuntu 5.10 x86 and things just work.  The install is dead easy and the user account, other than the window behavior focus, is very well configured.  Fonts look good the desktop and applications locations are very well thought out.  Kubuntu is a single disk install and very basic with some quirks.  I can understand needing to run 'apt-get install build-essentials' to set up the development environment but why isn't the installer smart enough to know wht processor(s) I have.  I also needed to run 'apt-get install linux-686 linux-686-smp'.  Not hard but you have to know you need to do this.  Nothings perfect.  If anyone is interested in installing [k]ubuntu I strongly suggest registering on the ubuntu forums site.  Very active and very helpful.  After a little searching I added some repositories and was able to easily add and upgrade everything I needed.

This is not the whole story by any means, I installed and wiped 9 different distros and now I am going to leave titan alone for a while and get more familiar with kubuntu.

My current final word on this story is that I am less than impressed with AMD Athlon 64 4200 x2.  With 2 gigs of ram fast disks and more I expected the system to be faster.  Doing things like image conversion with xnview and gimp I don't think the system is as fast as my 3.2 gHz Pentium 4HT.  However, when doing more than one thing at a time, I mean why should I wait to convert 200 images or burn a dvd or some such, the AMD x2 shines.  So, some things take a little longer but I'm not waiting for it.

A few weeks ago I started in on a new computer system.
Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-SLI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 dual core cpu
NVIDIA 6600 GT graphics
Couple of 250 gig SATA hard drives
Optical ...yada yada.

First problem was that although the motherboard said I had a dual core cpu Fedora Core 4 didn't think so.  I threw on Windows just to check and Windows also thought I had a single cpu.

Gigabyte said the motherboard was suitable for X2 dual core, what's up?
Nick Francesco of Sound Bytes fame has 2 repeating cures for computer problems.
1) Update the bios
2) Reinstall the O.S.
He was right with #1, there was an update for the bios only available at Gigabyte's Taiwan site and not at any mirrors and it's beta.  But it worked and a reinstall of the O.S as per #2 worked.  Tada!

After installing Fedora Core 4 I set up user accounts and the root configs and all is well.  Fast machine!
I used 'yum update' and then installed the NVIDIA graphics driver, version 7676.  All hell broke lose.  The mouse started jumping all over the screen doing random clicks all on it's own.  Screens opening and closing, fonts changing and colors flashing.  Yikes.

I replaced the ps2 mouse with a usb mouse and rebooted.  All was well for a few minutes until the keyboard repeats started to go crazy.
% rpm -Uvh would look like rrrrrrpppmmmmmm -------UUvvvvhhhhhh
Then the mouse went wacky again.

OK, I tried installing Kubuntu.  Kubuntu was happy, happy but I don't really know the idiosyncrasies of Kubuntu and I don't want to learn right now.  Plus I couldn't get a DVD to play smoothly.  Did I mention that I also had this problem with Fedora Core 4?

I tried CentOS version 4.2 which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linus v4.  It's a commercial OS and should be more stable than Fedora.  I skipped the NVIDIA driver because I suspected it was the problem.

Well, the mouse was happy but the key repeats was still with me.  I could and did turn off keyboard repeats and that was that.  But I like keyboard repeats!
DVDs didn't play smoothly either.  Things were kind of sluggish.  Hummm, nothing in messages.

After a great deal of google'ing I found out that they (and they know who they are) broke the kernel.  By default Fedora Core 4 uses the 2.6.11 kernel and I used this while setting up the system.  After the yum upgrade I would have a 2.6.13 or 2.6.14 kernel and it has issues with SLI motherboards and X2 cpus.  I thought it was NVIDIA because I did all at once but not so.

I reinstalled FC4.  One thing I really hate about yum is that I can't configure it to ignore new kernels, it's all or nothing.

A co worker suggested apt-get and the 'dag' repository.  I went to http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
install the version of 'apt' found there and upgraded my new system with all upgrades, but not the kernel then, because I like to live dangerously, I installed the NVIDIA driver.

That’s it. It’s the kernel. Somewhere after the 2.6.11 kernel SLI and X2 support was broken. There are still problems with the 2.6.14 FC4 kernel and I have not found a patch yet. But currently my DVDs play fine and the keyboard and mouse are behaving themsleves.