Ben’s Blog

First off, I’m sorry that I haven’t written anything here for such a ridiculously long time. Partly because, well, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m writing now.

I’ve finally settled on a name for my new computer: I’m going to call it moose2, as was originally planned. The component list does differ considerably from that which I wrote a few months ago, so here is the new list:

• Motherboard: DFI DK P45 T2RS
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
• RAM: Corsair XMS2 4GB PC-6400
• GPU: Sapphire Radeon 4870 512MB
• HDD: Samsung Spinpoint 640GB
• PSU: Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 650w
• Case: Coolermaster CM690
• HSF: Thermaltake TRUE Black with two Scythe S-Flex 1600 RPM fans
• DVD: Something generic
• OS: Windoze Vista Home Premium SP1 x86-64, Ubuntu 8.10, Gentoo 2008.0

That is considerably higher spec’ed than the list I’d already put together. However, with the four cores of the processor there’s hopefully a lot more future proofing there. I already have the case, as you can see from a couple of posts back, where I squirted things at it and attacked it with sharp things.

I ordered those components on Thursday, with one delivery from Ebuyer and one from Scan. Unfortunately, in the week running up to when I ordered, the price of the Q6600 shot up by about £25, but I haven’t changed my mind. With that HSF, I should be able to push up to and (hopefully!) beyond 3.6GHz quad core.

Today, just after lunch, the doorbell rang and there was a nice parcel from Ebuyer for me! I haven’t been at school since Wednesday due to an operation on my mouth, which then led to the back of my mouth being infected which is all very nasty. However, It did mean that I was there to look at my goodies. In the parcel was the graphics card (although you wouldn’t know it from the box!), and a copy of windoze. Apparently, I’m violating the OEM licence agreement if I don’t provide reasonable phone support to myself! Hopefully, it won’t every come to that. Picture:

I already have plans for after I build him (I’m building him at Christmas - I won’t have enough money to pay for all the parts until then, but we decided it was wise to buy in advance. Parent loans ftw.). Oops - I’ve just realised I’ve started calling moose2 ‘him’. Ah well.

These nice shiny after-moose2-upgrades are:

• Samsung Pebble 20″ monitor
• Asus Xonar DX soundcard
• Sennheiser PC-350 headphones
• Logitech G15 Keyboard
• Logitech G9 Mouse

I’m not sure how much of that I’ll actually buy, though - definitely the monitor. The rest of them are things I’d like but aren’t really necessary.

I have plans for after that too- slightly more ambitious, though. They involve building a whole case from dark, smoky acrylic, with red CCFL lighting and water cooling. We’ll see what happens.

Begin update:

The Scan order came a couple of days ago, with all the rest of my parts. I took some pictures, so let’s stick them up here!

A few things have happened recently that I’d like to write about. This post may get a bit nothing-y in which case, I’ll try to stop.

It’s my birthday in about a month, and we (Sean, Jonathan, Pete and I, the Geek Clique), are going to have a LAN party. We plan to play Supreme Commander and Command and Conquer Generals, perhaps with small bouts of Assault Cube and Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. We need a network switch, but that costs very little. The games are all on amazon for less than £5 each. We’ll see how it turns out.

This week, one of my friends at school has begun to write a comic called ‘Ronnie’. It is a blatant ripoff of Dilbert, but he denies it. I’ve agreed to host it on the internet, and I’ll see how long he keeps producing them. The link is in my blogroll, or at http://mooseguy.com/ronnie.

After last week’s ShefLUG meeting, I decided to have a go at installing Gentoo on my powerbook. The installation was successful, and I’m going to mess with X now. Should be fun.

Given that I was bored this evening, I thought I’d try twitter, which sean is always going on about. I made an account, installed a wordpress widget, and it seems to be working nicely now.  As you can probably see from the tweets, Sean and I want to go to a ShefLUG meeting - they seem very eager - haven’t had any young people going to the meetings for a few years. Should be fun. Anyway, Have I got News For You Now.

I’ve just bought a VPS from bitfolk! (www.bitfolk.com). I bought the 120MB RAM server in London. I got the last one! The servers went out of capacity as soon as I bought it, which means that I got the last one! It runs Ubuntu 8 (Hardy Heron). qIt’s currently accessible at antlers.mooseguy.com. I’m also running my own nameservers, not silentflames, which makes me feel happy. Sean is scared that I am going to move mooseguy.com onto it, and take it off Silentflame. I don’t think I will, though. Time to configure iptables…

Well, the upgrade failed. Utterly. I presume it was because the nvdia drivers I have installed completely messed up the xorg.conf file. I tried restoring from backup, but when that failed I really couldn’t be bothered to fix it, so did a clean install. I decided to go with Ubuntu this time, as the clean looks of Gnome have really won over me since a while ago. Maybe KDE 4.1 in July will change that. I don’t know. Anyhow, the install went smoothly, I installed the restricted drivers, compiz fusion etc etc until I had it how I wanted. Took about half an hour =). Looks very nice, and I have changed the overall feel to the Kubuntu blue, rather than the Ubuntu brown.

Eyecandy aside, I’m going to try to use nix more, as I can play music over my ipod (my main reason  for using winduhs, other than gaming.) I already have Gentoo installed, but tend to use that just for remote connecting from school with SSH, and acting as a mini web server. Oh, it also lets me say that I have a triple boot computer.

Yesterday, my father said that I could have an old mac laptop (Powerbook G4, running OS X 10.3). I decided to nixify it, downloaded Xubuntu PPC and burned a disk. There are advantages to having a 20Mb/s internet connection! Slightly off topic, but last week, Jonathan and I found an accelerating broadband connection mentioned in the Guardian! 2Mb per second per second. I put the disk in, and spent about ten minutes trying to work out which boot option would boot Xubuntu without crashing the computer. Turned out to be live-nosplash-powerpc. The laptop doesn’t like spash screens, evidently. Any other option made the screen a slightly distressing shade of green, with a slight gradient. Once I’d booted, the installed ran without trouble. However, when I rebooted, it shut down immediately, because there was no nosplash boot option! Grub doesn’t run on PPC, so you have to use Yaboot, which isn’t really as mature. There was a fix on the ubuntu forums though. I had to boot the livecd again (with live-nosplash-powerpc), open a terminal, edit the /media/disk/etc/yaboot.conf file (/etc/yaboot.conf accessed from the livecd), and change all instances of ’splash’ to ‘nosplash’. Then, run ybin, or, if you like a good laugh, ybin -v. After yaboot has been updated, and, if you ran it verbosely, your hard drive has been blessed with holy penguin pee (try it yourself), then you can boot straight into Xubuntu. The next problem was getting the network card to work. Luckily, the wired connection worked, so I wasn’t completely lost. (This is turning into a guide for how to install Xubuntu on a PowerBook G4). I found a very good post on the ubuntu forums again. You need to be using a Broadcom networking card (which is in PowerBooks). You can check by running lspci | grep Broadcom\ Corporation. If you get some kind of output containing the words ‘Broadcom Corporation’ then you’re probably alright. You then need to download this file: http://svit.epfl.ch/stuff/wl_apsta.o . Then, install the package bcm43xx-fwcutter. It’s in the Universe repository, if you havn’t enabled it (Google it if you don’t know how to enable it). Ignore the GUI prompt that comes up during the installation. Just close it. Once it’s installed, run the following command: sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware ~/Desktop/wl_apsta.o .Or wherever you saved the file. Then, run sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/`uname -r` ~/Desktop/wl_apsta.o . Or, again, wherever you saved the file.  Reboot, et voila. Wireless works. Next, since the powerbook only has one mousebutton, I wanted to be able to right click without pressing F12 (The default key). It is very easy. run sudo vim /etc/default/mouseemu . Uncomment the line which says Left Ctrl + Click next to it. Do this by deleting the hash at the beginning of the line. Press i to enter insert mode, then delete the character. Press escape, and type :x <enter>. Now, run the following command: /etc/init.d/mouseemu restart. You can now right click by control clicking.

There you go! Xubuntu set up nicely, and with minimal effort.