rm-rf.ca

Up a little too late tonight hacking away at my new system, here's the new smolt hardware profile.

Just a few quick notes:

• First thing I tried to do was crack open the case and install my old hard drive and video card. Motherboard had slots for neither, requires a PCI Express x16 video card, and SATA hard drive. This leaves me stuck with analog video and out 320gb of storage, but I've since learned that you can buy low end video cards for as low as $40 and $15 IDE to SATA adapters. (anyone ever use one of these? hoping it's a reliable solution.)
• Vista sucks. I booted it up just to see what the experience was like, slow is the best word for for it. Slow and glitchy. In any case I was frustrated just trying to boot it and shut it down and it's long gone now.
• Booted F10 x86_64 Live CD (faster than Vista would first boot mind you) and installed. First time I've used LVM when partitioning, never paid any attention to it until a few weeks back and now feel pretty stupid for not using it these many years.
• Booted up the system, started a 16 GB transfer from my old machine and a simultaneous yum update. Thought to make sure both boxes were networked through gigabit interfaces and attached to the same switch, speeds up to 30MiB/s at times. Awesome. Watching System Manager show the usage of each of the four CPUs through the whole process entertained me for a little too long.
• Fedora owned on the hardware detection front. (at least so far) All 4 CPU cores, 6 gigs of memory, video at full resolution (on two monitors I tried), and sound all working without any involvement from me.
• This thing is viciously fast. The AMD 64 3200+ I'm replacing wasn't "slow" per-se, but starting to feel that way.
• Box is nice and quiet. The AMD was ok normally but if it got busy the fan picked up and the noise was brutal. This one seems to stay quiet no matter what's going on.
• No time tonight but I got a small start on the virtualization front using the Fedora Getting Started With Virtualization guide. I *think* I have KVM ready to go.

That's it for tonight.