Technology - Systems

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Ted's workstation

I built this particular workstation in June of 2002. I picked a modular design so that I hope I can keep extending it's life by adding components and upgrades. So far everything has been running great, and I still feel like it is still just breaking-in.

However, I do have one improvement I would like to make. With three fans plus a Volcano Thermaltake on the processor, it runs cool but loud! So I need to work on a noise-reduction plan. Despite that gripe, I love the case.

Workstation blog

Sat, 5 June 2004 16:36 -0500 ¶ My workstation is two years old this month! It still runs pretty well but every now and then it feels a little long in the tooth. But I can't complain too much, as it is still able to run FarCry in hi-resolution mode without many lags. I am thinking about increasing the memory and maybe even the processor.

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 14:27 -0500 ¶ A couple of months ago I, regrettably, had to switch the box to full time Windows XP use. My current position requires program development and testing in a Windows environment. I miss some things in GNU/Linux, but XP is not so bad.

Mon, 14 Apr 2003 13:52 -0500 ¶ In my continuing migration to KDE, I have switched from Sylpheed-Claws to KMail for my e-mail client. I was noticing a latency with Sylpheed since switching to Gentoo and its more pure KDE installation. When implementing GPG on Gentoo with KMail, I found this great HowTo.

Mon, 11 Apr 2003 07:59 -0500 ¶ I upgraded KDE to 3.1.1a yesterday because of this KDE security advisory.

Mon, 26 Mar 2003 13:29 -0500 ¶ Got my sound system working yesterday using ALSA. The guide from Gentoo was fantastic. The only addition I had to make was to add the "alias" user to the "audio" group.

I am still tweaking some things here and there but for the most part, I am up and functional. I also forgot to mention in my last post that two new things that I am trying are ReiserFS on my root partition and metalog as my system logger of choice.

Mon, 24 Mar 2003 22:18 -0500 ¶ Well, I finally did it. I had been thinking for a while about trying out the Gentoo Linux distribution. So I spent this weekend reconfiguring my system and installing Gentoo. So far, I am glad I did. For a while, I have been frustrated with Red Hat's tampering with certain things, in particular KDE. Now I get to play with Gentoo which is a highly customizable implementation with full standard support for key components like GCC and KDE.

Now I am in the process of getting everything back to the way I like them to be and installing all of the applications that I use on a regular basis. The one thing still not working is sound. I am going to try to use ALSA this time.

The one thing that I would recommend doing, in hind-sight, is to get the binaries CD. Having to compile everything from source is a pain and takes forever if you use a lot of different applications. If you are configuring a specific-purpose server, like a web server, then it would not take nearly as long.

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 10:03 -0500 ¶ For the past couple of weeks, I have been working primarily in KDE. I was getting tired of the inconsistencies between application UI's as well as general instability in GNOME. I am also apprehensive about GNOME's implementation of a Windows like application registry and Miguel de Icaza's obsession with an Open Source implementation of .Net in Mono.

I have a tendency to vacillate when it comes to things like this, so we shall see. But for now, I am using KDE as my default desktop.

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 22:45 -0500 ¶ Upgraded to Red Hat Beta Phoebe 8.0.94. This the second beta for the anticipated release of Red Hat 8.1 due in April.

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 14:52 -0500 ¶ The system still seems to be running at decent idle temperatures. I just checked and the CPU was at 49.5°C while the Main Board was at 27°C. According to AMD, the maximum temperature should be around 90°C for Socket A CPUs (Athlon XP) 1.33GHz or more.

Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:24 -0500 ¶ I am becoming more and more addicted to Empire Earth. I only allow myself to play it once a week because I lose all sense of time and responsibility when I am conquering! I also just purchased the Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest expansion. It adds some pretty cool terrains, as well as three new campaigns (with 18 new scenarios) and a new 15th epoch.

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 12:24 -0500 ¶ I just upgraded my workstation to GNOME 2.2 RC2. There are still a couple of bugs but overall its very stable. The most noticeable improvement is its speed.

I also upgraded X to XFree86 version 4.2.99.3. This is a beta version of the upcoming version 4.3. It also has been fantastic especially since it probed my NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 without a problem. Now I do not have to use that hideous VESA driver or taint my system with NVIDIA's driver.

Ted's workstation at a glance

Technical Features
CPU	AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with Quantispeed
Speed	1.667 GHz 266MHz Bus
Power	300 W ATX Smart Power
Memory	512 MB PC2700 DDR
HDD	60 GB ATA/133
CD	HP DVD Writer dvd400i 8x/4x/12x 24x/10x/32x
Graphics Processor	NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 128 MB
Sound	Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 24-bit/100db SNR
Speakers	Altec 4100 5pc System
Monitor	19"/18" Diamondtron
Keyboard	Belkin Ergoboard 109 key
Mouse	Logitech Optical Trackman
OS and primary applications: Last updated: 5 June 2004.	Microsoft Windows XP - Professional SP1
	Microsoft Office v2003
	Browsers: Firefox v.8, Mozilla v1.6, Opera v7.51
	FeedDemon v1.10 RSS Reader
	TopStyle Pro v. 3.10 for markup (XML, XSL, XHTML & CSS) development
	Macromedia Studio MX 2004 for Python, PHP and markup (XML, XSL, XHTML & CSS) development
	Photoshop CS for digital imaging
	HTML Tidy released 1st June 2004 for XHTML validation
	DocBook DTD v4.2 & utilities
	EditPlus v. 2.12 for text editing