I ordered the component list on Friday (28/8) and I picked up the components from work on Saturday (5/9) after returning from Edinburgh.

http://www.dabs.com/ seemed a little slow (more than a week to get everything and I altered my list to ensure they had stock), gave me an authorisation form twice to fill in, even though I have been a customer for several years and offer no presales advice.

The presales question I asked dabs simply if the CPU came with a stock cooler. Turns out it does. I did search about and it did seem retail Intel CPU boxes contain a cooler, so I guess presales isn't really necessary.

Ebuyer's crappy compensation

Unfortunately the case from Ebuyer arrived damaged. I called Ebuyer, who asked me to send the pictures, which I did, for compensation. A week has gone by and they have not got back to me. Disappointing.

Despite Ebuyer promising to discuss the matter with me, I have since noticed Google checkout refunded me the grand total of 8GBP for the damage to the case door. That is a sad token amount, compared to even the time I spend photographing, uploading and chasing up the problem. I am too lazy to take out my mainboard and send it back to them and Ebuyer knows that.

Building the PC

It was actually quite difficult to find a Phillips screwdriver with a magnetic tip to build the PC. Eventually I found one, though the better looking ones from B&Q, were the PZ types. So I bought that one, worried that it might not be able to grip the Phillips screws, but it was fine!

I was quite impressed with the Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard heatsinks (no fans, yay!). Fitting the i7 CPU was a little scary as there aren't pins any more and you have to be quite hard with the lever. I was also surprised to see it had an IDE connector. Nice for an old CD drive to read legacy backup CDs.

The case seems quite large, but it seemed quite tight fitting the full mainboard. I was surprised to see that the reset, power and HD leds were still little fiddly cables. I thought that would become like a combined USB cable after these years.

Power up was scary. It didn't power up. I was worried the speaker was malfunctioning as I expected an error beep. After losing my mind for 10 minutes, it turns out I didn't plug in the second ATX power cable. This is a right 'balls up' IMO as the cable from the PSU is 4x4 and you are expected to put it in a 8x8 connection on the motherboard near the CPU.

Thankfully I had it powered up and I tested everything worked by booting Webconverger from my USB keyring.

The BIOS was a little old skool and gives way too many tweaks on memory. Gigabyte are ricers. Need to figure out how the hell I am supposed to update the BIOS should the need arise.

After inspecting the BIOS, it seemed that only 2G of my memory was being picked up as I fitted them right after one another. Memory voltage, speeds, acronyms seem really complicated nowadays. I moved one of the bars across and thankfully 4G showed up.

The VGA card

The VGA card that Dabs sold me is not a dual DVI. Dabs has mis-sold to me as their Product page clearly says "Dual DVI support". They took more than a month to admit the :"advertising team have advised that unfortunately on this occasion the item was incorrectly described on our website". Next I ordered a BFG Graphics GeForce 9500GT to replace the card. This does have two DVI ports, but sadly it is noisier than the card it's replacing!

Yes, I tired upgrading to nvidia 190.x beta drivers and using:

Option "Coolbits" "4"

With nvidia-settings to no avail. Still noisy.

The 9500 GT although one model down and using DDR2... still powers Quake more than 125fps constantly!

Archlinux

I installed Archlinux from USB in about 5 minutes. It was that quick. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out X support with nvidia. The keyboard/mouse was not working and it turned out that xf86-input-keyboard and xf86-input-mouse were not installed. Wtf!

http://static.natalian.org/2009-09-05/i7-cpuinfo.txt

I installed abs and immediately tried to build libwebkit. Building Webkit is something I do quite often at work on my Thinkpad X61 and it's painful and sweaty work. Needless to say on the i7 building Webkit is insanely fast and satisfying.

Quake Live

Getting up and running with Quake Live was pretty quick. My name tag is draq btw. I was surprised it all worked so well without any tweaks. I ramped up the graphics to fit my 1680x1050 Samsung and it runs 125+fps and never goes down. I am serious. It's really quick. I am happy that I took advice not to buy a more expensive graphics card. I read some Quake Live linux threads WRT input lag. No input lag here. Fantastic gameplay. id Software get a lot of love from me. I wish there were now more decent Linux games!

Audio issues

I am not sure if this is Gigabyte's or Antec's fault. But the front side audio once connected to the mainboard is noisy.

Connecting my headphones to the back of the case is the workaround.

The VelociRaptor

X61 is about 2663

[root@i7 ~]# hdparm -T /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   18948 MB in  2.00 seconds = 9487.43 MB/sec

X61 was about 38

[root@i7 ~]# hdparm -t /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads:  358 MB in  3.01 seconds = 118.96 MB/sec

The hard drive is not noisy and it seems fast. I now have a 1TB drive to go with it.

Incidentally the 1TB disk seems just as fast according to hdparm.

Sensors

I heard the i7 920 is good to overclock to 3.2GHz from 2.67GHz. Unfortunately acpi under Archlinux does not seem to report the CPU (or any) temperatures.

Solution was to sudo pacman -S lm_sensors, sudo sensors-detect and sudo /etc/rc.d/sensors start. Now running sensors reports:

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:      +41.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0001
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 1:      +41.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0002
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 2:      +40.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0003
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 3:      +43.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0004
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 4:      +41.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0005
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 5:      +41.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0006
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 6:      +40.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0007
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 7:      +43.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

it8720-isa-0290
Adapter: ISA adapter
in0:         +0.94 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.08 V)
in1:         +1.90 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.08 V)
in2:         +3.31 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.08 V)
in3:         +2.99 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.08 V)
in4:         +0.30 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.08 V)
in5:         +3.15 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.08 V)
in6:         +0.13 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.08 V)
in7:         +2.14 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.08 V)
Vbat:        +3.22 V
fan1:       1962 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan2:          0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan3:          0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan4:          0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
temp1:       +33.0°C  (low  = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
temp2:       +37.0°C  (low  = +127.0°C, high = +60.0°C)  sensor = thermal diode
temp3:       +45.0°C  (low  = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
cpu0_vid:   +2.050 V

Right, Quake Live is out on Linux and I've heard it runs best on nVidia.

An Xseries Thinkpad starts at 1113GBP...

Also see http://superuser.com/questions/30062/linux-i7-rig-for-quiet-stability-and-maybe-a-little-quake-live

Component list ~649GBP

Case

http://www.dabs.com Antec case selection didn't have:

• Antec NSK 6580B ~80GBP

Hard drive

• 150GBP 10000RPM - 111GBP

i7

Does this box come with a stock cooler?

• Intel's Nehalem 920 CPU ~200GBP

Mainboard

• Gigabyte EX58-UD3R ~134GBP

Video card

I need two DVI outputs!

• GeForce 9600GT Dual DVI ~61GBP BFG Graphics GeForce 9500GT 550Mhz 1GB DDR2 PCI-Express 2xDVI ~46GBP

RAM

• 4G of DDR3 RAM ~63GBP

I’m disappointed to hear Nokia aiming to re-invent itself as an Internet company.

Yes, Nokia re-invented itself before from rubber boots. And yes shifting boxes like what Dell does is kinda boring (and not very profitable). However I still think the mobile hardware industry has a long way to go before reaching the sort of unsexy stage the commodity PC market is in.

Right now I think Nokia should restructure. Nokia has something like 100000 (~65000 in Finland last I heard) employees and its the kind of company that would not miss a tenth of those employees. Nokia needs to concentrate on paying talent more money for a start.

Innovate in the mobile hardware space Nokia. I think there is much more to be done here and I really think they could take on the Iphone with their excellent maemo developer platform (urm, with a GSM chip would be nice).

I don’t think they should necessarily do software or a browser, let alone get into the Web “Internet company” game. Any Nokia Web service I’ve seen has been god awful. They have a legacy of crap Web applications that I don’t see how Nokia can get a fresh start on the Web.

Nokia.mobi is supposed to be one of the most popular mobile Web sites, receiving billions of hits. Have you ever visited this Nokia.mobi site? It's absolutely embarrassing. I assume the reason why anyone visits it, is that it's the default homepage on the devices they sell.

Recently we’ve seen Nokia getting into the ad business and into retail and spreading itself even more. Cut the fat and focus on hardware and commit to an open software platform like maemo please Nokia.

I just cleaned my desk from MWC2008 stuff and I noticed some notes I took down whilst speaking with an interesting French Openplug engineer.

He told me, in order of expense:

1. Screen
2. CPU
3. Memory
* RAM
* NORflash
* NAND

I’m not sure what are the prices for each. Any ideas?

You might interested in my earlier media price survery too.

My sister’s T30 running Ubuntu dapper that I gave her is experiencing some sort of problem with the hard drive.

I upgraded the hard drive less than a year ago. So I am a little dismayed as it is well within its 4 year guarantee.

First I expected to fsck from when Ubuntu’s startup bombed out with its instructions. Instructions that could not work, because the problem is with the root partition where fsck and other utilities live.

Next I get out a Ubuntu alternate CD out and boot it up. Unfortunately when I used rescue mode I could not manage to run fsck on the drive. Useless.

Next I booted from a USB hard drive I have. I managed to boot the kernel from the USB, but I could not manage boot the rest of the system from the USB hard drive.

Next I found a dusty copy of Knoppix from May 2004 and booted the system. Great. Now I run fsck on /dev/hda1 and it asks for prompts that some illegal blocks on inode 8 need to be cleared. Then inode 8 itself needs clearing. Ummmm… ok. I wish I didn’t prompt me and just fixed everything. So there I am pressing yes to bloody well fix it.
Then it restarts itself and again the same problem with inode 8, though this time with different blocks. Oh no. What to do?

I decided to copy and paste the text and upload the output somewhere to show someone. Ah, unfortunately the wavelan configuration of this version of Knoppix does not seem to support the cisco aironet device. How odd.

Hours later I am downloading Ubuntu 6.10 desktop CD and see if I can fix things from their demo mode. Ok, the same problem as with the Knoppix CD. UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY. This manual loop of clearing illegal blocks is getting nowhere. Dead hard drive?

Ok, I have since discovered /home is on /dev/hda6 which is fine after fsck. Though /dev/hda1 seems to have serious issues. So if one partition is alright and the other isn’t… then is the hard drive really defective? Ummm, wondering is there some some “memtest86” for hard drives.

With the help of my local user group DCGLUG, I have been pointed to “badblocks”. After a full scan nothing has shown up. I’ve also now fixed all the problems with /dev/hda1 with fsck -y, though boot files are damaged. So right now I conducting an install with Ubuntu 6.10 and praying it does not b0rk the existing /home on /dev/hda6…

Seems to be working! Had to chown -R 1000:1000 on the old home directory from console as it would not log in otherwise. Now I have to install all those silly proprietary codecs my sister requires to listen to music and watch movies…

I’m home in the UK temporarily and I am having to deal with the painful realities of home computing.

I have myself (partly) to blame. I’ve bought some crap hardware, but haven’t we all?

Though I don’t know what possessed me to purchase a CIT200 Linksys Skype phone for my parents. Well I know why. So my parents could communicate cheaply. Unfortunately the USB device is dependent on Win32 drivers. So moving them over to Ubuntu dapper, not possible. Also Skype is proprietary FOOL. Argh…

One step at a time you might say. They’re not quite used to OpenOffice yet. They’ve been using the pre-bundled Microsoft Works 7 (.wps files), which aren’t compatible with OpenOffice. Oh no. In fact wps files aren’t compatible with new versions of Microsoft Office.

Oh, WTF?

Thanks to a online resource I installed a plugin for Works7 to export wps files into Word compatible RTF files. Those files I can import into OpenOffice.

That’s painful. My mother has made quite a few documents that each have to be manually updated to doc and then opendocument text (odt). That’s painful.

A simple letterhead of my parent’s business shows the import is leaky. God knows how to extend that border line to the right. Or correct the font. I frustratingly tried to edit and format the letterhead and it couldn’t get it to align nicely to right. What a pain.

Our good neighbour Morley has been more keen to use Linux. He is a complete novice and I helped order the parts from dabs.com with him two years ago. He never got it working and since recently returning to Praze Farm I had a look at his machine.

A local computer store said his Radeon 7000 works. It doesn’t. He did manage to procure an old Matrox PCI MGA which does work. He got as so far as to install Fedora, but never managed to get the dialup modem working. I noticed he was trying to get a Winmodem working. sigh

He says he is familiar with Fedora since he had some Linux Format magazine guide. Of course I want him to use Debian, or Debian based like Ubuntu Dapper. Now I have to convince to, re-install. Pain. I am also trying to convince him to get broadband now.

Years ago I bought my parents a mini-itx (when they were all the rage) based machine from scam, sorry scan.co.uk who built a very noisy machine. Recently I just turned off the fan and took the side case panels off. Seems to be OK. I want to “upgrade” the machine as the USB ports are dodgy, the network card hates DHCP and the sound card doesn’t work. I did hunt around for a machine, but the Mac mini might be again too painful for my parents and it doesn’t have a mic jack for Skype. WTF.

I looked around dabs and I can’t believe they sell machines with 256mbs of RAM. Also they don’t reveal how loud they are which is super important to me. And they’re not cheap. I am missing Korean prices. And does the hardware work with Dapper? Hmph. Lets face it, hardware support pages don’t help. You’d be hard pressed to source the tested machines. I ran a great Ubuntu desktop machine on a high end Thinkcentre in Korea. I want that back. It was also quiet. I also loathe, hate and break out into angry fits about having to buy Microsoft Windows whilst buying a computer.

I am thinking back to my adventures with computing at home. It really just hasn’t worked out for poor Linux. The biggest breakthrough is having broadband with a Linksys WAG354G-UK. I am greatly indebted to a local LUGer Neil Stone for helping my parents set this up. They would not have managed the broadband setup without him. We have a peculiar problem with our phone line and if some phones are plugged in the modem could never reliably maintain a connection. We’ve unplugged all our phones and broaband does work, except we have terrible landline quality issues. Argh, another reason why my parents like Skype a lot.

So I can share the Internet reasonably from my lovely Thinkpad X40 wireless. Though only in one room. The walls are so thick in praze farm, the signal doesn’t go into my bedroom or the kitchen. I noticed the WAG354G has an aerial port, but I couldn’t find an aerial that claims to support it. I contacted Linksys and they said the product isn’t on the market and suggest purchasing instead the WRE54G v2. I can’t find that device on dabs. Anyway we have several rooms in this house. I am not going to buy a wireless repeater for each room! So wireless and big old thick walled houses is pain.

Hopefully in the future I’ll get my WRT54G that I send via sea from Korea and install that upstairs where the walls are thankfully just partitions and see how that goes.

Another important problem I have been keeping myself busy with are backups or “digital preservation”. My strategy is to copy everything precious and organise them on an external 80G USB hard drive which already has fallen off the desk a couple of times. I’ve ripped down DVDs of home videos to VOB, but since neither of our machines at home are particularly powerful, I can’t convert them to theora!

I have many digital images that I need to track in some database. I need to write a program to do that. I’ve been too lazy to do so. We keep a lot of printed photographs in our cupboards. It’s remarkable how they’ve preserved, although my mother chucked out all the negatives as she claimed they were all “stuck together” and useless. Damn, I don’t think I will digitising photographs anytime soon.

There are two main problems I think with my parents and computing. Hardware and know how. My mother claims she would attend computer courses, but there aren’t any ones with Ubuntu and say OpenOffice and Firefox (Gmail)!

The most pressing problem is that it is hard to buy compatible hardware without falling for some Microsoft trap. At least I have my parent’s using Gmail and now we have broadband so I can access . They seem happy with that, though I’m not. There really needs to be Free software comparable to Gmail.

We’re at least no closer any to “free computing” after all these years.

I’m quite excited about watching the Football World cup on the eve of its schedule kicking off.

Though I am a little worried how I am going to watch it, as I don’t have a TV. *I hate TV*s and I don’t want one and I’ve successfully lived without one for almost 5 years.

Admittedly when I see a TV at a friend’s place I am glued to it like a young child in awe. Well, that’s the problem. I don’t want to waste time with it.

Admittedly I was looking around my building’s recycling depot in case someone recently upgraded their TV and threw out their old one. No such luck.

I also had a look at DVB since it is used widely in Seoul. Though the USB device for my X40 costs 70USD and I wasn’t sure I could get it working under Linux.

So my idea is to watch the world cup with the help of a bit torrent site like mininova.org. I prefer watching video this way as I can watch it at 3x speed and quickly watch the highlights. Though I will dearly miss BBC‘s coverage. Esp. the commentary. Pity their Real/Windows media service sucks so much. And its only available in the UK. Daft.

I also will be endeavouring to go out to watch the games. Probably somewhere in Itaewon with the rest of the expats. Though this will be difficult in the early hours of the morning. And I am not a fan of “live” games either. I don’t like hearing yobs spouting obscenities and smoke in my presence during a game.

Oh well, wish me luck and er… England!

Update: I’ve rebroadcasting Radio5 for people wanting to catch the World cup on the Radio who aren’t in the UK.

This M$ Vista delay analysis got me thinking about the relationship between hardware manufacturers and well, us, the “Free software” geeks.

Vista will no doubt drive hardware sales due to its high hardware requirements. Hardware manufacturers just love that.

But does Ubuntu or Debian drive hardware sales? Erm, probably not.

“competing hardware manufacturers are violating each others patents so much that they cannot publish specifications of their hardware without showing which patents they are violating.” -Aki

I’m sure M$ has no qualms about signing NDAs with hardware companies. But for us, the future isn’t easy.

I don’t think consumer hardware companies are going to shoot for Ubuntu’s certification scheme. And Ubuntu is the consumer version of GNU Debian/Linux right now.

At work I am keen to move away from white boxes to something say listed on Red Hat’s HCL.

Pain.

IBM
* Unable to find a midi tower with my specs in mind
* Unable to quote over the Internet
* Take forever to quote from what I’ve heard
* Stupid promotion with renting a server…
* Too expensive

HP
* Unable to quote over the Internet
* Stupid size of company questions. I KNOW THE SPEC THAT I WANT.
* Minimum requirements of software. FFS…
* Too many unneccessary questions
* Awful Website, awful URLs, awful navigation…
* Microsoft 2003 server

DELL
* Terrible Website, terribly long forms, URLs make little sense
* Asking me for too much information like the size of company and applications! FS.
* Getting put on hold and transferred to two different sales people and then onto an engineer in Bangalore
* Still takes seemingly forever to quote
* Seem to settle on a SC1420
* Eventually get an email quote with PDF attachment with 200AUD knocked off the quote given over the phone. I hate these annoying Dell promotion codes.
* Difference in RAID-1 solution and non-RAID solution is like 1000AUD. That’s insane.
* Trying to get me to buy 4×512 RAM instead of 2×1G. Honestly…
* Seem to be unable to refer to a Web form to complete payment. FS. Looks like I have to call them up voice if I want buy this. ARGH!

Update: Another email from Dell with a large PDF and survey, saying if we order today, we get 100AUD off! Instead I’ve decided to buy local a rack and cabinet from our dedicated server hosts, Hostcentral. The price in the end wasn’t far from Dell’s quote and it was a more “professional” rack format.