Ben’s Blog

Hello! As you may have noticed, I am redesigning my website at the moment. I am working on a new way of navigating my blog archives, but the javascript isn’t behaving, and as I’m no JS programmer I don’t really no why =). I’ll get Xyzu to fix that, though when I get back to school. However, while I let this site rot I am learning LaTeX, which is a typesetting languages that lets you make nice documents and formulae. See Sean’s latest blog post for more info.

I finally have it! I’ve just opened it, and am thinking WOW! In fact, I’m typing this on it! More later…

*edit - I’ve had to disable comments on this post due to the ridiculous amount of spam comments I’ve been getting.

I opened some of my presents early today, and guess what I got… DUCK TAPE! I’m so excited!

I’m down to the last few now, so here they are:

• ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
• Abit KN9S
• MSI K9N SLI Platinum
• I think that the MSI board looks the best, but I’m not sure yet. Got to decide =)

A couple of days ago, Sean ordered a slug, and I am cross. Better known as the Linksys NSLU2, it is a little device, a bit smaller than a router, that can turn a USB hard disk into a NAS. However, since it runs a Linux OS, it can be hacked, and you can install Debian! This means that you can use it as a web server, a file server, a mail server and many more kinds of servers. Amazingly, it’s only £55 (Plus a USB hard disk). A slug is now top of my ‘WANT!’ list.

As an update to one of my posts a while ago, I still would like an Antec 900. I also still want a nice new motherboard, but am not quite sure what I want to get. Ideally, it needs an AM2 socket, have 4 DDR2 slots and a PCI-Ex16 slot as an absolute minimum. It also needs 4 SATA ports and several PCI-Ex1 slots. Talk to me if you know of one.

A PC World repair man came yesterday as my winduhs hard disk had broken. It used to be 160GB, but the new one is 400GB! However, the man was pretty stupid as the disk was missing a jumper needed to make it work properly. However, I added that.

Gentoo works now as well! I am very happy, as you can probably tell from my last post =)

I also now have a quintuple boot computer! Here are my OSes…

• openSUSE 10.3 KDE
• openSUSE 10.3 Gnome
• Gentoo *insert kernel version here*
• Ubuntu 7.10
• Winduhs Blista

Here are some first impressions…

openSUSE 10.3 KDE

I like 10.3 quite a lot more than 10.2. in 10.2 I had to install the nVidia kernel module by hand, but using the rather nice new ‘One Click Install’ function, I had it in about five minutes. YaST is as good as ever, but I’m still waiting for KDE 4. I wouldn’t recommend openSUSE to a complete *nix newbie, but for someone that sort of knows what they’re doing.
openSUSE 10.3 Gnome

I’m not sure whether I like Gnome more than KDE. From first glances, Gnome seems to be more business like and stylish, and even a little bit faster, but they are completely different, and it’s certainly your taste. I do like the way that openSUSE have customized Gnome, though. Apart from that, just read the KDE bit.

Gentoo

Gentoo took me about 3 hours to install, but the feeling at the end was worth it! =). It’s the first ever OS that I’ve used that didn’t come with X, but I like the power that you feel when you sit in front of a terminal. Definitely NOT for someone that doesn’t know where they’re going, as EVERYTHING is manual. I’d use it for any server stuff that I wanted to do.

Ubuntu 7.10

Ubuntu took me about 20 minutes to install. It is CERTAINLY the most user friendly OS on my computer at the moment, which is why I’m not a big fan of Ubuntu. However, it does have a very nice package manager, and Gnome is very easy to theme. If you are new to Linux, then this is the OS for you.

Wow! That must be my longest blog post ever! I have missed out Winduhs because I don’t want to contaminate my site =) And know, back to my lovely quintuple boot computer…