turgid's Journal: Sign of the Times (Slackware 12.2)

I'm very disappointed with Slackware 12.2. I went to upgrade my old K6-2/500 this evening with Slackware 12.2 and it doesn't boot :-(

The reason is that the CPU doesn't have the cmov instruction, so Pat must be compiling with PentiumPro (II/III and greater) instructions.

So, not only is there not an official 64-bit Slackware (I am using Slamd64 on my main box) but now it doesn't run on all of my old gear.

I pressed F2 to see a list of kernels at the boot prompt, but there's just the one available.

Woe is me.

heh

[GigsVT]

I've given away computers 2 gens ahead of that. :)

Re:

[turgid]

I've given away computers 2 gens ahead of that. :)

I bought it 10 years ago. It's been upgraded and cannibalised and eventually reassembled over the years. I keep it because it's still fast enough to be useful. It has 512MB of RAM.

I've also still got Dicky's old dual Pentium III/550 (192MB), a Sun Blade 100, my old Athlon XP2000+ (512MB dual 120GB IDE disks), a Sun Netra i (UlrtaSPARC 143MHz, 128MB RAM, SCSI disks), a Pentium II/350 (64MB) which used to belong to SCO, and my very first PC which now has a

Re:

[Short Circuit]

I was hoping to go quad core and max out the RAM at 8GB soon.

Dodo, my current box, was built for under $500. The purchased parts list has 8GB of ram, a quad-core Phenom 9650, a decent motherboard, a 500W PSU and a 1TB hard drive. Beats the pants off the old P4. Apparently, the Phenom II will include a few chips in the 95W TDP range, will initially be socket-compatible with the Phenom, and so will likely work in motherboards like mine with little more than a BIOS upgrade. My only complaint with Dodo is that I get tearing artifacts when using mplayer to play back v

Re:

[Corporate Troll]

Didn't I send you a 512Meg DDR stick back in the day? Since you don't seem to be using it anymore, you could send it to Tet [slashdot.org]. Just saying ;-)

Re:

[Short Circuit]

Indeed. :-)

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Well contact Tet then.... :-D

Re:

[Short Circuit]

I will. :-)

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Good... I hate it when hardware is just becoming useless :-)

Re:

[Short Circuit]

The box it is in was going to go to a friend of mine who is using a Pentium 90 as his primary box. But I've got some other RAM that will work in the box I was going to give him, and it would still be an upgrade for him. And that's ages away, anyway, for other reasons.

Re:

[Corporate Troll]

Ah, okay... That's fine too.... It was really just a suggestion :-P

Re:

[turgid]

What motherboard have you got? I've got an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe which will allegedly take up to a Phenom 9950. I was hoping soon there might be a BIOS upgrade to let it take the Phenom II X4 940... then I will be happier than a man called Mr Happy who has just won the Happysville Lottery and binged on Prozac.

I haven't tried ATi graphics for years. They keep disappointing me. I stick to nVidia since their Linux drivers are pretty darned good in comparison. Hopefully the ATi stuff will get much better now tha

Re:

[Short Circuit]

BIOSTAR TFORCE TA780G [newegg.com]. I went with this board because you can apparently use the DVI and VGA outputs at the same time. I may take advantage of this to hook up to an HDTV while still using my 19" VGA LCD.

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Yes, so do I... I don't consider P-II or P-III class machines any more when dumpster diving. I did make an exception last Saturday, because it seemed to have a USB PCI card and those can really be useful. (Mainly if you put too many device on your motherboards USB ports, the voltage used may get too high and devices fail. A USB PCI card is a good alternative to a USB Hub, especially if you've got enough PCI slots). I scavenged the AGP graphics card from it (The ubiquitous GeForce 2 MX, but I have a big

Re:

[turgid]

Old computers are useful for software bloat testing.

Having said that, I really should try out some other OSs and distros. I was thinking of trying Gentoo on the K6-2/500. The Athlon XP now has Slackware 12.2. A friend of mine is a NetBSD kernel guy and he's always encouraging me to try it. I'm just putting Solaris 11 build 104 on my Sun Blade 100. I might put NetBSD on the old Netra. I have a dual processor E450 in my shed, which I've never used. The processors are only 333MHz and it's only got 128MB of RA

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Oh, I love old computers. I just lack the space to store them... :-(

Re:

[turgid]

Yes, space is a big problem here too. One day when we buy our own house (in about a million years the way things are going) I'm going to turn the loft into a server room. The house will be wired with ethernet. I think I might get an old Diesel engine and use it to make electricity by burning waste vegetable oil too. That should be fun.

Maybe a server garage would be better?

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Attics tend to overheat in the summer. For server rooms I'm an adherent of the basement. What you plan to do, is what I plan to do. Guess, it's a common geek-house-owning-dream ;-)

Re:

[turgid]

Attics tend to overheat in the summer. For server rooms I'm an adherent of the basement. What you plan to do, is what I plan to do. Guess, it's a common geek-house-owning-dream ;-)

Yes! A server room of your very own.

I was thinking about some simple yet novel insulating techniques coupled with waste heat reclamation. Unfortunately most British houses don't have basements. Usually there is only about 0.5-1 metres of an air gap between the floor and the foundations, and its home to mice and spiders. There a

Re:

[jawtheshark]

A basement is pretty much a must here... My server?

Wait a second....

root@mako:~# sysctl hw
hw.machine=amd64
hw.model=AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+
hw.ncpu=1
hw.byteorder=1234
hw.physmem=2145947648
hw.usermem=2144546816
hw.pagesize=4096
hw.disknames=wd0,cd0,cd1,fd0
hw.diskcount=4
hw.cpuspeed=2000
root@mako:~#

Yes, most of it comes from the dumpster....

It doesn't do squat all day:

root@mako:~# uptime
11:07PM up 155 days, 2:52, 2 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.11, 0.09
root@mako:~#

It will eventually