Thursday August 04, 2005
Thursday August 04, 2005
New computer
I've been planning to put together a new server for home. The intention
is for it to provide mirrored storage for the rest of the machines in
the house (Macs mostly). My wife always accuses me of always getting
new computers. Well the machine I'm looking to replace is a 300mhz K6
running RH9. You decide if I'm always getting new computers...
The new machine is based on a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum with an Athlon64 3200+.
It has 2gb of DDR333 ECC (don't ask) ram and four 120gb seagate ata drives
and a cdrw/dvd-rw drive. I've got a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 controller in
the box so that I can handle all drive that I have after using up all
the connections the motherboard can handle.
The machine has been put together for about a month or so. I've been
trying to decide what OS to run on it. I've installed Solaris 10,
Fedora Core 4, and SUSE. I've found that they all had quirks in the
install process. After thinking about it I've decided to go with
Solaris. This is not a decision made lightly. I've been running linux
for a long time. My initial linux was kernel 0.97 on a 386 (which I
still have). I think I still have some of those floppies. I don't
remember where I got it but I do remember it being a big improvement when I
got my first "distribution" from the University of Texas site.
Eventually I went with Slackware. The first time I actually paid for a
subscription was the Yggdrasil collections. I ran Slackware
distributions for quite a long time. The system was quite a hodgepodge
when I finally decided to switch to RedHat (6.0). That switch was quite
painful since I had a lot of additions for handling the Macintoshes and
sharing the Apple laser printer hanging off one of the macs. I have to
admit that once I switched to RH I never really liked it but the
thought of doing another switch was just too painful. I continued to use RedHat but I felt
trapped.
Now that I'm making another big leap in thinking about swapping out a
big collection of hardware to a much more compact and powerful box the
decision comes again. When I first installed Solaris 10 on this machine
the on board ethernet controller didn't work. I thought oh well so much
for that experiment. But I looked around and found that there is
actually a community of people producing drivers. This is cool so I
downloaded the driver
and it installed no problem. [Actually I understand the "Hardware-1"
update to S10 already has a driver for the controller on the board.] So
then I thought well if there are people out there producing drivers
maybe this will be doable. It's somewhat like going back in time
because when I was first running linux on the 386 I contributed a
driver to XFree86 for the video card I was using. So my thought was if
someone like me can't get there home system running the way they want
on Solaris then what hope do other people have. So I've decided to take
the plunge and you'll get to read about it here. Can I switch and how
long will it take. Stay tuned...
Aug 04 2005, 11:37:49 AM EDT
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