Josh Saddler

Let's see, where was I? Ah, yes. Last weekend-ish, I built my own machine. It went beautifully; I even got the LEDs and front ports all setup correctly in spite of a very vague manual. Next, it was on to the Gentoo installation! I spent the next few days getting everything installed & setup, and over the last two days I finally finished getting almost my entire desktop & development tools ready. I'm business with CVS commits from it, too.

(Oh yes, and I did pick out a rather good hostname; I ended up using the title of a short story I've been writing. ^_^)

I'm happy to say that this was the easiest installation I've ever had. I've never seen this much hardware supported so well, not even on my old P3 laptop. ACPI, sound, even lm_sensors all work beautifully. Now, unfortunately, though the AMD64 liveCD runs perfectly well, the GLI cannot, unfortunately, give me a bootable system. YMMV. That was the only frustration, and it lasted only a day. I gave it a try on my third HDD, the testing one, since I figured, why not? But it was not meant to be. Went through the networkless mode, just for fun. (Ended up reading the networkless handbooks I wrote, too! ). No dice, though. Ah well. Besides, the GLI does not support RAID installation yet, though agaffney is working on it, so I just used the liveCD as a very nice desktop to do the tried and tested CLI method. Worked like a charm; had no problems getting everything RAID-ified.

Very pleased with my new machine; it's at least 4-10 times as fast as the lappy in terms of performance. I feel like there's nothing it can't do. I initially had some temperature worries when I was installing the heatsink, since it slid around a bit before I could lock it down. (Side note: the AM2 mounting mechanism combined with my heatsink is a huge pain; I had to press down so hard was worried I would break the motherboard. Seems to be okay, though.) Thought I might have to redo the AS5 thermal grease, since my idle temps were 40deg. C, which is a little higher for an X2. However, now it looks like I'm reaching the specified burn-in time on the thermal material; it needs some days (or weeks) to get broken in before temperatures really drop even further. I've already seen a 3C drop since I first turned it on, so now it idles around 36.5, same thing goes for system and HDD temps, and that's with a warm passive video card's heatsink sitting 1MM under the CPU heatsink. Nice'n'cool, should mean plenty more years of faithful Gentoo operation. Curiously, the northbridge is warmer than everything but the graphics card; it idles at about 40-42C. Then again, the nForce 500 chipsets are known to run noticeably warmer than the previous nForce 4 chipset, so it's not that unusual.

I'm fighting the urge to tinker with the insides again . . . though it's a very quiet workstation, I'd like to do something about the fans, as they're the sole source of noise. I might have to buy a fan controller, since my earlier voltage-reduction experiments were only partway successful. I could only get one fan to start reliably at 5V; the rest need 12V. But now that I've built it, I want to muck about with the hardware. There's something really fun about hacking hardware, isn't there? Maybe the urge to tinker is what led me to Gentoo in the first place.

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Postscript: no, Gentoo does not actually require constant tinkering. If it ain't broke . . .

Post postscript: . . . but it sure is fun to play with.