Shane's Blog » Linux

Major (Partition) Surgery

Shane — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 04:35:33 +0000

Over the past few months I’ve been wanting to put Windows XP back on my main PC for SAS work. Swapping plugs between computers is just too painful! Unfortunately when partitioning I created too many primary partitions and now I can’t make any more. Unfortunately Windows won’t install on a extended partition. The solution, as suggested by Malx, was to backup everything with cp -fRa then delete/rearrange partitions before restoring everything back to the new partition!

The Joys of Gentoo

Shane — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 00:56:59 +0000

Apparently you are supposed to run the etc-update command regularly to keep your Gentoo Linux system healthy. hmm. This was likely the reason for my udev dying a couple of weeks ago. I must say – I’m less impressed with Gentoo now! Oh well, emerge is still the best package management system I’ve seen so I might just fix my partions and reinstall in 32-bit mode Gentoo Linux this Wednesday at the MITS Install Day.

More 64-bit goodness

Shane — Sun, 22 May 2005 10:10:49 +0000

I can now confirm the Linux support for the Asus K8N-E Deluxe nForce 3 250Gb based motherboard is very good (as of 2.6.11 at least!!). I now have SATA working (needed to enable the nVidia SATA support under the SCSI section) and the onboard nForce Audio is also working fine without the official drivers.
I still haven’t had a chance to check out the video related problem everyone is warning about (see my previous post), but at this stage it is looking better than I had first thought since a lot of people use DivX and Xvid these days.

Going 64-bit

Shane — Fri, 20 May 2005 07:10:20 +0000

Last Monday I purchased a new PC. The specs are pretty spiffy: its a AMD Athlon 64 3000 (2Ghz) system running on an Asus K8N-E Deluxe motherboard (nForce 3 250Gb based motherboard with SATA and onboard LAN & sound). I decided to try Gentoo Linux with has been with mixed success. Here are some notes:

SystemRescueCd and KNOPPIX are both great tools for doing system maintaince work. I put my old hard drives in the system and booted into KNOPPIX do copy over the files before there was even any operating system installed. One problem I had, which I’m not sure how it is related, was getting the partioning/formatting of the new SATA drive done. In the end I used the Ubuntu Linux 64-bit install CD to do the partitioning then SysRescCd/KNOPPIX.
All the various live CDs I’ve used have recognized the SATA drive ok, but the kernel I’ve installed myself doesn’t. I’m not sure if I might have missed a module somewhere. Generally the Asus K8N-E Deluxe/nForce 3 250Gb hardware seems to work well with Linux – better than the Silicon Image SATA RAID controller thats onboard anyway.
I’ve started reading about how to do Gentoo on AMD64 it seems there are some tricks to get certain applications working. So far problem programs which are easy to get working have been openoffice and firefox/flash. They just have 32 bit binary versions you can install.
Video might be a bit harder because of the w32 codecs being 32-bit dlls. I personally use Totem, but most of the info online points you to using mplayer and doing a lot of mplayer voodoo magic to watch videos.

Thats all for now… I will try to put some more info up soon.